Beyond the Happening: Performance Art and the Politics of Communication [1 ed.] 9781526144461, 9781526144454

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Beyond the Happening

rethinking art’s histories S E R I E S E D I TO R S

Amelia G. Jones, Marsha Meskimmon Rethinking Art’s Histories aims to open out art history from its most basic structures by foregrounding work that challenges the conventional periodisation and geographical subfields of traditional art history, and addressing a wide range of visual cultural forms from the early modern period to the present. These books will acknowledge the impact of recent scholarship on our understanding of the complex temporalities and cartographies that have emerged through centuries of world-​wide trade, political colonisation, and the diasporic movement of people and ideas across national and continental borders.

Also available in the series Colouring the Caribbean: Race and the art of Agostino Brunias  Mia L. Bagneris Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960 

Amy Bryzgel

Bound together: Leather, sex, archives and contemporary art  Andy Campbell Art, museums and touch 

Fiona Candlin

Travelling images: Looking across the borderlands of art, media and visual culture  Anna Dahlgren Staging art and Chineseness: The politics of trans/​nationalism and global expositions  Jane Chin Davidson The ‘do-​it-​yourself’ artwork: Participation from fluxus to relational aesthetics  Anna Dezeuze (ed.) Empires of light: Vision, visibility and power in colonial India  Niharika Dinkar



Fleshing out surfaces: Skin in French art and medicine, 1650–​1850  Mechthild Fend Art, Global Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution  Jacopo Galimberti, Noemi de Haro-​García and Victoria H. F. Scott (eds) The political aesthetics of the Armenian avant-​garde: The journey of the ‘painterly real’, 1987–​2004  Angela Harutyunyan The matter of miracles: Neapolitan baroque sanctity and architecture  Helen Hills The face of medicine: Visualising medical masculinities in late nineteenth-​century Paris  Mary Hunter Glorious catastrophe: Jack Smith, performance and visual culture  Dominic Johnson Otherwise: Imagining queer feminist art histories  Jones and Erin Silver (eds)

Amelia

Addressing the other woman: Textual correspondences in feminist art and writing  Kimberly Lamm Above sea: Contemporary art, urban culture, and the fashioning of global Shanghai  Jenny Lin Photography and documentary film in the making of modern Brazil  Luciana Martins After the event: New perspectives in art history  Charles Merewether and John Potts (eds) Women, the arts and globalization: Eccentric experience  Marsha Meskimmon and Dorothy C. Rowe (eds) Flesh cinema: The corporeal turn in American avant-​garde film  Ara Osterweil Productive failure: Writing queer transnational South Asian art histories  Alpesh Kantilal Patel The ecological eye: Assembling an ecocritical art history  Andrew Patrizio



Migration into art: Transcultural identities and art-​making in a globalised world  Anne Ring Petersen After-​affects|after-​images: Trauma and aesthetic transformation in the virtual Feminist museum  Griselda Pollock Vertiginous mirrors: The animation of the visual image and early modern travel  Rose Marie San Juan The synthetic proposition: Conceptualism and the political referent in contemporary art  Nizan Shaked The paradox of body, building and motion in seventeenth-​ century England  Kimberley Skelton The newspaper clipping: A modern paper object  Heesen, translated by Lori Lantz

Anke Te

Screen/​space: The projected image in contemporary art  Tamara Trodd (ed.) Art and human rights: Contemporary Asian contexts  Caroline Turner and Jen Webb Timed out: Art and the transnational Caribbean  Leon Wainwright Performative monuments: Performance, photography, and the rematerialisation of public art  Mechtild Widrich

Beyond the Happening Performance art and the politics of communication Catherine Spencer

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Catherine Spencer 2020 The right of Catherine Spencer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library I SB N

978 1 5261 4445 4 hardback

First published 2020 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or any third-​party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover: Marta Minujín, Simultaneidad en simultaneidad (Simultaneity in Simultaneity), Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires, October 1966. Courtesy of the Marta Minujín Archive, Buenos Aires, and the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA).

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Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Introduction: Communication studies

page viii xvii xix 1

1 Allan Kaprow’s lesson plans

31

2 Marta Minujín’s sociability experiments

81

3 Carolee Schneemann’s group work

133

4 Lea Lublin’s exercises in denaturalisation

181

Conclusion: Breaching experiments and social bodies

225

Bibliography Index

238 266

Figures

0.1 Wolf Vostell, poster for Three Country Happening, 1966, reproduced from an original pencil-​on-​paper design. Courtesy of the Allan Kaprow Papers, c. 1940–​97, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (980063), and the Estate of Wolf Vostell © DACS 2019. 0.2 Marta Minujín, Simultaneidad en simultaneidad (Simultaneity in Simultaneity), 13 and 24 October 1966, Happening at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires. Courtesy of the Marta Minujín Archive, Buenos Aires and the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA). 1.1 ‘Photo Play’ booklet, n.d., featuring images of graffiti walls and children creating collages, produced as part of Project Other Ways, directed by Allan Kaprow and Herbert R. Kohl, supported by the Carnegie Corporation and the Berkeley Unified School District, Berkeley, California. Courtesy of the Allan Kaprow Papers, c. 1940–​97, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (980063), and the Estate of Allan Kaprow. 1.2 Allan Kaprow, Gas, August 1966, Happening performed in the Hamptons, Long Island and New York, with contributions from Charles Frazier, Mordi Gerstein and Gordon Hyatt, sponsored by Dwan Gallery and WCBS-​TV. Courtesy of the Allan Kaprow Papers, c. 1940–​97, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (980063), and the Estate of Allan Kaprow. 1.3 Pamphlet produced for Project Other Ways, n.d., directed by Allan Kaprow and Herbert R. Kohl, supported by the Carnegie Corporation and the Berkeley Unified School District, Berkeley, California. Courtesy of the Allan Kaprow Papers, c. 1940–​97, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (980063), and the Estate of Allan Kaprow. 1.4 Allan Kaprow, poster with scores for Six Ordinary Happenings, 1969, sponsored by Project Other Ways, Berkeley, California. Photographs by Carol Bowen. Courtesy of the Allan Kaprow

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Papers, c. 1940–​97, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (980063), and the Estate of Allan Kaprow © J. Paul Getty Trust. Allan Kaprow, Giveaway, May 1969, part of Six Ordinary Happenings, sponsored by Project Other Ways, Berkeley, California. Courtesy of the Allan Kaprow Papers, c. 1940–​97, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (980063), and the Estate of Allan Kaprow. Allan Kaprow, Giveaway, May 1969, part of Six Ordinary Happenings, sponsored by Project Other Ways, Berkeley, California. Courtesy of the Allan Kaprow Papers, c. 1940–​97, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (980063), and the Estate of Allan Kaprow. Allan Kaprow, Travelog, July 1968, Happening presented for the Eighth International Artists’ Seminar, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, New Jersey. Courtesy of the Allan Kaprow Papers, c. 1940–​97, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (980063), and the Estate of Allan Kaprow. Allan Kaprow, Travelog, July 1968, Happening presented for the Eighth International Artists’ Seminar, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, New Jersey. Courtesy of the Allan Kaprow Papers, c. 1940–​97, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (980063), and the Estate of Allan Kaprow. Ed Ruscha, Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1963 (detail), artist’s book, 7 1/​16 in × 5 1/​2 in × 3/​16 in (17.9 cm × 14 cm × 0.5 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian © Ed Ruscha. Jurgen Ruesch and Weldon Kees, ‘Gestures as Substitutes for Words’ and ‘Nonverbal Accompaniments of Verbal Communication’, in Nonverbal Communication: Notes on the Visual Perception of Human Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 77, 78. Joy Aschenbach and Robert Mayer, ‘As an Art Form, It Happened to Be a Fire Hazard,’ Newsday (12 May 1967). Courtesy of the Allan Kaprow Papers, c. 1940–​97, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (980063), and the Estate of Allan Kaprow. Allan Kaprow, Fine!, April 1969, part of Six Ordinary Happenings, sponsored by Project Other Ways, Berkeley, California. Courtesy of the Allan Kaprow Papers, c. 1940–​97, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (980063), and the Estate of Allan Kaprow. Allan Kaprow, Shape, April 1969, part of Six Ordinary Happenings, sponsored by Project Other Ways, Berkeley, California. Photograph by Gretchen Garlinghouse. Courtesy of the Allan Kaprow Papers, c. 1940–​97, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (980063), Gretchen Garlinghouse and the Estate of Allan Kaprow.

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1.14 Allan Kaprow, Shape, April 1969, part of Six Ordinary Happenings, sponsored by Project Other Ways, Berkeley, California. Courtesy of the Allan Kaprow Papers, c. 1940–​97, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (980063), and the Estate of Allan Kaprow. 1.15 Allan Kaprow, Days Off: A Calendar of Happenings (1970) on display at the Arte de sistemas exhibition, 1971, Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires, organised by the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC), Buenos Aires. Courtesy of the Allan Kaprow Papers, c. 1940–​97, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (980063), and the Estate of Allan Kaprow. 1.16 Experiments in Art and Technology, Children and Communication, 1971. Courtesy of the Harry Shunk and Shunk-​ Kender Photographs, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2014.R.20). Photograph Shunk-​Kender © J. Paul Getty Trust. 2.1 Marta Minujín, La destrucción (The Destruction), 1963, Happening at the Impasse Ronsin, Paris. Courtesy of the Harry Shunk and Shunk-​Kender Photographs, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2014.R.20), and the Marta Minujín Archive, Buenos Aires. Photograph by Shunk-​Kender © J. Paul Getty Trust. 2.2 Minucode survey, Women’s Wear Daily 116, no. 89 (6 May 1968): 16. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 2.3 Marta Minujín, Minucode, May 1968, environment at the Center for Inter-​American Relations, New York City. Courtesy of the Marta Minujín Archive, Buenos Aires. 2.4 ‘Cocktail Parties –​Are Hosts People?’ Newsweek 55, no. 18 (2 May 1960): 25. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 2.5 ‘Stars at Washington Square,’ Continuing Education, newsletter of the School of Continuing Education, New York University (February 1968): 1. Courtesy of the Fonds Pierre Restany, INHA-​ Collection Archives de la critique d’art, Rennes, and the New York University Archives Collection of University Publications and Promotional Materials (MC 334). 2.6 Marta Minujín, Circuit (Super Heterodyne), April 1967, environment supported by the Youth Pavilion/​George Williams University, Expo ’67, Montreal. Courtesy of the Marta Minujín Archive, Buenos Aires. 2.7 Marta Minujín, Circuit (Super Heterodyne), April 1967, environment supported by the Youth Pavilion/​George Williams University, Expo ’67, Montreal. Courtesy of the Marta Minujín Archive, Buenos Aires.

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2.8 Shunk-​Kender, the US and USSR pavilions at Expo ’67, Montreal, 1967. Courtesy of the Harry Shunk and Shunk-​Kender Photographs, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2014.R.20). Photograph by Shunk-​Kender © J. Paul Getty Trust. 2.9 Carolee Schneemann, Night Crawlers (Rampants de la nuit), 1967, performance at the Youth Pavilion, Expo ’67, Montreal. Courtesy of the Harry Shunk and Shunk-​Kender Photographs, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2014.R.20) and the Estate of Carolee Schneemann, Galerie Lelong & Co., Hales Gallery, and P•P•O•W, New York © Carolee Schneemann. Photograph by Shunk-​Kender © J. Paul Getty Trust. 2.10 Marta Minujín, Minucode, 1968, screening session at the Center for Inter-​American Relations, New York City. Courtesy of the Marta Minujín Archive, Buenos Aires. 2.11 Tony Martin, poster for Game Room and ‘Invironment’, 1968, Howard Wise Gallery, New York City. Courtesy of the Howard Wise Gallery Records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, and Tony Martin. 2.12 Marta Minujín, Minucode, 1968, Tony Martin’s light environment, Center for Inter-​American Relations, New York City. Courtesy of the Marta Minujín Archive, Buenos Aires. 2.13 Marta Minujín, Interpenning, August 1972, Happening in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, Museum of Modern Art, New York City, as part of the Summergarden programme. Courtesy of the Marta Minujín Archive, Buenos Aires. 2.14 Peter Moore, performance view of Juan Downey’s Energy Fields, 21 February 1972, 112 Greene Street, New York City. Courtesy of the Estate of Juan Downey © 2019 Barbara Moore/​ licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, Courtesy Paula Cooper, NY. 2.15 Marta Minujín, 200 Mattresses (The Soft Gallery), 1973, environment at Harold Rivkin Gallery, Washington, DC, in collaboration with Richard Squires. Courtesy of the Marta Minujín Archive, Buenos Aires. 2.16 Marta Minujín, Nicappening, 12 June 1973, Happening for the Nicaraguan Earthquake Art Relief Managuan Homeless Settlement Committee benefit, Sotheby Parke-Bernet, New York City. Courtesy of the Marta Minujín Archive, Buenos Aires. 2.17 Marta Minujín, Kidnappening, August 1973, Happening in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, Museum of Modern Art, New York City, as part of the Summergarden programme. Courtesy of the Marta Minujín Archive, Buenos Aires.

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2.18 Marta Minujín, Kidnappening, August 1973, Happening in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, Museum of Modern Art, New York City, as part of the Summergarden programme. Courtesy of the Marta Minujín Archive, Buenos Aires. 3.1 Carolee Schneemann, Illinois Central group work exercises, c. 1966–​68. Photograph by Max Waldman. Courtesy of the Estate of Carolee Schneemann, Galerie Lelong & Co., Hales Gallery and P•P•O•W, New York © Carolee Schneemann. Photograph © Max Waldman Archives USA, All Rights Reserved. 3.2 Lawrence and Anna Halprin, Blindfold Walk, 2 July 1968, from the Experiments in Environment Workshop, 1–​24 July 1968, Kentfield, California. Courtesy of the Lawrence Halprin Collection, the Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania. 3.3 Carolee Schneemann, Newspaper Event, 29 January 1963, performance at the Judson Dance Theater, Judson Memorial Church, New York City, gelatin silver print, 8 in × 10 in (20.32 cm × 25.4 cm). Courtesy of the Estate of Carolee Schneemann, Galerie Lelong & Co., Hales Gallery and P•P•O•W, New York © Carolee Schneemann. 3.4 Carolee Schneemann, poster for Round House, July 1967, Happening at the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, Roundhouse, London. Courtesy of the Estate of Carolee Schneemann, Galerie Lelong & Co., Hales Gallery and P•P•O•W, New York © Carolee Schneemann. 3.5 Carolee Schneemann, Round House, July 1967, Happening at the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, Roundhouse, London. Photograph by Michael Broome. Courtesy of the Carolee Schneemann Papers, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University (M1892), and the Estate of Carolee Schneemann, Galerie Lelong & Co., Hales Gallery and P•P•O•W, New York © Carolee Schneemann. 3.6 Carolee Schneemann, Round House, 1967, Happening at the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, Roundhouse, London. Photograph by Leena Komppa. Courtesy of the Carolee Schneemann Papers, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University (M1892), and the Estate of Carolee Schneemann, Galerie Lelong & Co., Hales Gallery and P•P•O•W, New York © Carolee Schneemann. 3.7 Carolee Schneemann, Viet-​Flakes, 1965, DVD of toned black-​ and-​white original 16mm film. Courtesy of the Estate of Carolee Schneemann, Galerie Lelong & Co., Hales Gallery, and P•P•O•W, New York © Carolee Schneemann.

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3.8 Carolee Schneemann, Round House, 1967, Happening at the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, Roundhouse, London. Photograph by Michael Broome. Courtesy of the Carolee Schneemann Papers, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University (M1892), and the Estate of Carolee Schneemann, Galerie Lelong & Co., Hales Gallery and P•P•O•W, New York © Carolee Schneemann. 3.9 Carolee Schneemann, Round House, 1967, Happening at the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, Roundhouse, London. Photograph by John Haynes. Courtesy of the Carolee Schneemann Papers, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University (M1892), and the Estate of Carolee Schneemann, Galerie Lelong & Co., Hales Gallery and P•P•O•W, New York © Carolee Schneemann. Photograph © John Haynes/​ Bridgeman Images. 3.10 Carolee Schneemann, Round House, 1967, Happening at the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, Roundhouse, London. Photograph by Michael Broome. Courtesy of the Carolee Schneemann Papers, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University (M1892), and the Estate of Carolee Schneemann, Galerie Lelong & Co., Hales Gallery and P•P•O•W, New York © Carolee Schneemann. 3.11 Carolee Schneemann, Sexual Parameters Survey, in Parts of a Body House Book, 1972, artist’s book, 33 cm × 20.3 cm, 66 pages, published by the Beau Geste Press, Cullompton, Devon, and Felipe Ehrenberg. Courtesy of Tate Archives and Special Collections, the Felipe Ehrenberg Estate, and the Estate of Carolee Schneemann, Galerie Lelong & Co., Hales Gallery and P•P•O•W, New York © Carolee Schneemann. Photograph © Tate, London 2019. 3.12 Carolee Schneemann, Sexual Parameters Chart II (Original) (Ye Olde Sex Chart), 1969, titled, dated, signed on reverse, type and pen on paper, 7 3/4 in × 24 in (19.69 cm × 60.96 cm). Courtesy of the Estate of Carolee Schneemann, Galerie Lelong & Co., Hales Gallery and P•P•O•W, New York © Carolee Schneemann. 3.13 Carolee Schneemann, Sexual Parameters Chart III (Original) (Ye Olde Sex Chart), 1971, titled, dated, signed on reverse, type and pen on paper, 8 in × 27 in (20.32 cm × 68.58 cm). Courtesy of the Estate of Carolee Schneemann, Galerie Lelong & Co., Hales Gallery and P•P•O•W, New York © Carolee Schneemann. 3.14 Carolee Schneemann, Parts of a Body House –​Genitals Playroom I (a), 1966, watercolour and ink on paper, 23 1/4 in × 26 1/2 in (59.1 cm × 67.3 cm). Courtesy of the Estate of Carolee

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Schneemann, Galerie Lelong & Co., Hales Gallery and P•P•O•W, New York © Carolee Schneemann. Carolee Schneemann, Portrait Partials, 1970/​2007, thirty-​five gelatin silver prints, 37 1/2 in × 38 1/4 in (95.25 cm × 97.16 cm). Courtesy of the Estate of Carolee Schneemann, Galerie Lelong & Co., Hales Gallery and P•P•O•W, New York © Carolee Schneemann. Lea Lublin, Mon fils, May 1968, Salon de Mai, Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, vintage gelatin silver print, 7 1/​16 in × 9 7/​16 in (18 cm × 24 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of the Modern Women’s Fund, the Latin American and Caribbean Fund, Estrellita Brodsky, and Mauro Herlitzka. Courtesy of Nicolas Lublin and espaivisor, Valencia © 2020 Lea Lublin. Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Washing/​Tracks/​Maintenance: Inside, 1973, part of Maintenance Art performance series, 1973–​74, performance at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut. Courtesy of the artist and Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York © Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Lea Lublin, Mon fils, May 1968, Salon de Mai, Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, vintage gelatin silver print, 7 1/​16 in × 9 7/​16 in (18 cm × 24 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of the Modern Women’s Fund, the Latin American and Caribbean Fund, Estrellita Brodsky, and Mauro Herlitzka. Courtesy of Nicolas Lublin and espaivisor, Valencia © 2020 Lea Lublin. Lea Lublin, Mon fils, May 1968, Salon de Mai, Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, vintage gelatin silver print, 7 1/​16 in × 9 7/​16 in (18 cm × 24 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of the Modern Women’s Fund, the Latin American and Caribbean Fund, Estrellita Brodsky, and Mauro Herlitzka. Courtesy of Nicolas Lublin and espaivisor, Valencia © 2020 Lea Lublin. Lea Lublin, Terranautas, 1969, environment at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires, fourteen gelatin silver prints, five maps, five typewritten texts on paper, six offset prints and twenty-​ five 35 mm colour slides. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of the Latin American and Caribbean Fund and Carlos Rodríguez Pastor. Courtesy of Nicolas Lublin and espaivisor, Valencia © 2020 Lea Lublin. Lea Lublin, Fluvio subtunal, 1969, Santa Fe, environment supported by the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires and ALPI (Asociación de Lucha contra la Parálisis Infantil). Private

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collection. Courtesy of Nicolas Lublin and Archivos del Instituto Torcuato di Tella, Biblioteca Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires © 2020 Lea Lublin. Lea Lublin, Arte de sistemas catalogue entry, 1971, exhibition at the Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires, organised by the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC), Buenos Aires. Courtesy of Nicolas Lublin and the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh © 2020 Lea Lublin. Lea Lublin, Interrogations sur l’art: Discours sur l’art, 1975, presented at the Foire internationale d’art contemporain (FIAC), Paris, featuring video equipment and a banner in synthetic polymer paint on fabric, wood and string, 110¼ in × 70 7/​8 in (280 cm × 180 cm). Banner in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of the Modern Women’s Fund, the Latin American and Caribbean Fund, Estrellita Brodsky, and Mauro Herlitzka. Courtesy of Nicolas Lublin and espaivisor, Valencia © 2020 Lea Lublin. Lea Lublin, Interrogations sur l’art: Discours sur l’art, 1975, presented as part of Une expérience socio-​écologique: Photo–​Film–​ Vidéo, Neuenkirchen, Germany. Courtesy of Nicolas Lublin and espaivisor, Valencia © 2020 Lea Lublin. Lea Lublin, Dissolution dans l’eau: Pont Marie, 17 heures (Dissolution in Water: Pont Marie, 5pm), 1978, Paris, gelatin silver print, 7 1/​16 in × 9 7/​16 in (18 cm × 24 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of the Modern Women’s Fund, the Latin American and Caribbean Fund, Estrellita Brodsky, and Mauro Herlitzka. Courtesy of Nicolas Lublin and espaivisor, Valencia © 2020 Lea Lublin. Pilvi Takala, Real Snow White, 2009, video. Courtesy of Pilvi Takala, Carlos/​Ishikawa and Helsinki Contemporary. Pilvi Takala, The Trainee, 2008, installation, three videos with a duration of 13:52 minutes, powerpoint presentation, key card and letter. Courtesy of Pilvi Takala, Carlos/​Ishikawa and Helsinki Contemporary. Adrian Piper, Catalysis III, 1970. Performance documentation: three silver gelatin print photographs on baryta paper (reprints 1998), 16 in × 16 in (40.6 cm × 40.6 cm). Detail: photograph no. 1 of 3. Photographs by Rosemary Mayer. Generali Foundation, Vienna, on permanent loan to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation, Berlin and Generali Foundation, Vienna.

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5.4 Otobong Nkanga, Baggage, 2007, reinvention of Allan Kaprow’s Happening Baggage, 1972, at various locations in the Netherlands and Lagos, Nigeria, commissioned by Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, in conjunction with the exhibition Allan Kaprow –​ Art as Life. Courtesy of Otobong Nkanga.

Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyright material, and the publisher will be pleased to be informed of any errors and omissions for correction in future editions.

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Acknowledgements

The writing of this book received significant support from a Philip Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship, and I am extremely grateful for the sustained focus this enabled. The Arts and Humanities Research Council, Carnegie Trust, J. Paul Getty Trust and Terra Foundation for American Art funded travel for primary research in the USA, Argentina and France. Any book, particularly one about interpersonal relations, amasses significant debts to multiple people, my greatest being to Jo Applin, who has provided support, inspiration and encouragement in equal measure. I would particularly like to thank Natalie Adamson and Julia Prest for their insight. Interactions and conversations from the informal to the more structured settings of conferences and seminars with a number of interlocutors have been invaluable:  especial thanks to Natasha Adamou, Fiona Anderson, Sam Bibby, James Boaden, Lucy Bradnock, Ruth Bretherick, Amy Bryzgel, David Peters Corbett, Lara Demori, Jason Edwards, Ruth Erickson, Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra, Jessica Freeman-​Attwood, Luke Gartlan, Chris Griffin, Sophie Halart, David Hodge, David Hopkins, Victoria Horne, Jeremy Howard, Amelia Jones, Kate Keohane, Kirsten Lloyd, Neil Macdonald, Martyna Majewska, Camila Maroja, Courtney J. Martin, Isabelle Mooney, Stephanie O’Rourke, Elisabetta Rattalino, Alistair Rider, Sam Rose, Camilla Mørk Røstvik, Natalia Sassu Suarez Ferri, Moran Sheleg, Sylvie Simonds, Vid Simoniti, Ana Sol González Rueda, Amy Tobin, Harry Weeks, Michael White and Marta Zboralska. I also owe a longstanding debt to Lisa Tickner. The Terra Foundation for American Art Summer Residency 2013 formed a deeply productive setting at an earlier stage in the research: thanks especially to Jean-​Philippe Antoine, Megan Cotts, Florian Fouché, Ken Gonzales-​Day, Mazie Harris, Kellie Jones, Miri Kim, Julia Klein, Sophie Lamm, Alex J. Taylor, Veerle Thielemans and Tatsiana Zhurauliova. The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress provided another nurturing environment: thanks particularly to Ned Allen, Wendy Asquith, Sophie Jones, Mary Lou Reker and Isabella Streffen. Marta Minujín and her studio, as well as the staff of the Fundación Espigas, made me feel welcome in Buenos Aires. Marc Giai-​Miniet very kindly

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Acknowledgements

provided access to the Salon de Mai archives. The staff of the Archives de la critique d’art; Archives of American Art; Bibliothèque Kandinsky; Bibliothèque nationale de France; Getty Research Institute; Instituto de Teoría e Historia del Arte ‘Julio E. Payró’, Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, University of Buenos Aires; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes Library; Museum of Modern Art, New York, Library and Archives; Stanford Special Collections and University Archives; Tate Archive; and Universidad Torcuato Di Tella Library and Archive all provided much appreciated assistance. I am hugely grateful to the anonymous peer reviewers who gave such helpful feedback, as well as to Emma Brennan and the Manchester University Press team for their expert guidance. Part of Chapter 4 was published in an earlier form in Oxford Art Journal, and I thank Oxford University Press for permission to reprint. It has been a great and sustaining pleasure to teach and learn from my students at St Andrews, particularly those who have engaged with performance art so enthusiastically. Lastly, thanks to my family, Eryl, Richard and Gareth, for their longstanding support, and, most of all, to James.

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Abbreviations

AFD APA CAV CAYC CIS DIAS FIAC GRAV ICA ICC MAMVP MLF MNAM MoMA UBA

Artists for Democracy Argentine Psychoanalytic Association Centro de Experimentación Audiovisual Centro de Arte y Comunicación Centro de Investigaciones Sociales Destruction in Art Symposium Foire internationale d’art contemporain Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel Institute of Contemporary Arts Internationaal Cultureel Centrum Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris Mouvement de libération des femmes Musée national d’art moderne Museum of Modern Art, New York University of Buenos Aires

Introduction: Communication studies

During 1966, the artist Wolf Vostell designed a poster that could be folded into a mail-​out, advertising a forthcoming Three Country Happening (Figure 0.1). The initiative, planned for autumn 1966, was the brainchild of a triumvirate of artists working in different continents: Marta Minujín in South America, Allan Kaprow in North America, and Wolf Vostell in Europe.1 Vostell’s creation proclaims the proposed Happening’s transnational ambitions, overlaying the sketchy outlines of each landmass, as well as that of Africa in the lower right-​ hand corner, with the stencilled surnames of each artist next to their respective cities of Buenos Aires, New  York and Berlin/Cologne. These metropolitan centres are linked by a triangle of dotted lines, rendered in thicker marks with a darker shade of graphite than the contours of the continents. This contrast conveys the impression that the challenges of brute geography are receding in the face of the dematerialised connections facilitated by media technologies, an inference further underscored by the poster’s trilingual Spanish, English and German text. Vostell’s annotations identify the triangular dotted line as a telephone link. Another three vectors, each labelled ‘TV’, surge outward from the cities to converge in the poster’s centre at a point representing the Early Bird satellite, suspended above the Atlantic Ocean.2 As these arrows indicate, the Three Country Happening was envisioned as a simultaneous performance in Buenos Aires, New York and Berlin, with the action relayed live on television via satellite. Circles of transmission waves pool around each city like ripples from stones thrown into a pond, spreading over borders and reconfiguring cartographic divisions into a diagram of transnational connectivity. Even though the project did not involve artists working in Africa, the continent’s inclusion signals Minujín, Kaprow and Vostell’s aspirations (as well as limitations), which, the poster anticipated, would culminate in 1967 with a ‘Global Happening Festival’. Their publicity presents the Happening as an art form capable of facilitating international communication, bound up with globalising impulses and, by extension, their examination and analysis.3

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Beyond the Happening

0.1 Wolf Vostell, poster for Three Country Happening, 1966, reproduced from an original pencil-​on-​paper design.

Unfortunately, the Global Happening Festival failed to materialise, while Three Country Happening was only partially performed. Minujín proved to be the sole artist possessed of the necessary zeal to carry through her part of the plan, indicating the disjunctions and imbalances that fissured the ideal of seamless connection projected by the poster. The resulting performance, Simultaneidad en simultaneidad (Simulaneity in Simultaneity), is highly instructive regarding the politics of communication as they played out in performance art from the mid-​1960s onward. Minujín presented her two-​part Happening at the audio-​visual theatre belonging to the art centres established by the Torcuato Di Tella Institute (Instituto Torcuato Di Tella) in the ‘microcentre’ of Buenos Aires. On 13 October 1966, Minujín welcomed approximately sixty

Introduction

Marta Minujín, Simultaneidad en simultaneidad (Simultaneity in Simultaneity), 13 and 24 October 1966, Happening at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires.

people  –​mainly journalists and celebrities, but also academics, a novelist and the psychoanalyst Enrique Pichon-​Rivière  –​into a futuristic environment.4 Television sets crowded the space, each positioned in front of a seat awaiting a viewer (Figure 0.2). The bristling antennae, combined with those belonging to an equal number of radios placed beside the monitors, looked to one attendee like a space-​age forest of metallic bamboo.5 Minujín orchestrated proceedings wearing an eye-​catching gold boiler suit, which transformed her into an astronaut-​like figure.6 After entering, guests were ‘photographed and filmed prolifically, from the front and from the side’, and subjected to audio interviews regarding their thoughts on proceedings.7 Nearly two weeks later, on 24 October, the subjects of this intensive documentation were invited back to the same room, whereupon they were bombarded with the images and recordings. Participants could review themselves ‘moving, standing up, sitting’ on the television monitors and slides projected around the room, and listen to recordings of their voices.8 In contrast to the improvisation that characterised Happenings presented by artists such as Kaprow in New York during the early 1960s, Minujín created a laboratory-​like setting in which people could scrutinise their comportment through mass media technologies. During the second evening of Simultaneidad en simultaneidad, the Invasión instantánea (Instantaneous Invasion) occurred. After the audience had viewed their mediatised simulacra, they were instructed to tune into the Canal 13

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television programme Universidad del aire (University of the Air). Ensconced in their compartmentalised television booths, participants watched a ten-​minute broadcast, the soundtrack for which consisted of a text read by Minujín that also played over Radio Libertad and Radio Municipal, which attendees were instructed to tune into.9 It contained images of Happenings by Vostell and Kaprow, supposedly occurring live and transmitted by satellite link. Footage followed of people undergoing the Invasión instantánea, which showed them at home watching television, before receiving a telephone call and a telegram delivered to their door. While these vignettes were prerecorded, they provided an analogue for a process occurring in real time. In his account of the piece, Michael Kirby reported that Minujín worked with researchers at the University of Buenos Aires to identify 500 people who owned a television and a telephone.10 As they watched the broadcast, these viewers received a call instructing them to look at their environment, and 100 of them were also sent a telegram telling them that they were a creator.11 Through this elaborate procedure, Minujín attempted to extend the sensitisation to media communications trialled at the Di Tella Institute over a much wider area. Simultaneidad en simultaneidad reads most immediately as a direct manifestation of Marshall McLuhan’s paean to the global interconnectivity facilitated by communication technologies in Understanding Media (1964). The notes for Minujín’s broadcast declared: ‘all these images and messages bring the world close to you, these mass media widen your environment’s frontiers … You “are” those [sic] news; without you they could not exist. Therefore your body’s physiology has extended  –​somehow  –​throughout the world.’12 Minujín reflected that the observation of the media was generally passive, but based on a fundamental paradox whereby the experience of viewing television or listening to the radio in ‘the context of the home’, surrounded by the accoutrements of ‘personal life’, was transformed by ‘the temporary irruption of the collective into this private context’.13 Simultaneidad en simultaneidad explored the possibilities for collectivity through the mass media, contrasting attempts to control behaviour within Argentina by the military Government that had assumed power in a coup during June that year, as well as binary models of centre–​periphery artistic relations.14 The Three Country Happening poster seeks to erase geographic distance, and in this respect speaks to the Argentine avant-​garde’s fervently internationalising ambitions during the 1960s, in which both Minujín and the Di Tella Institute played key roles. Yet Minujín’s Happening did not entirely deliver the vision of uninhibited immediacy conjured by Vostell’s poster. Unable to establish the live television broadcast between Buenos Aires, Berlin and New York, Minujín had also prefilmed the ‘simultaneous’ footage of Happenings by Kaprow and Vostell. Even a phone call that Kaprow tried to put through went awry; it later transpired that a friend had stepped into the breach when Kaprow could not connect.15 While these ruptures were

Introduction

unforeseen, Simultaneidad en simultaneidad’s overarching dynamic, despite its title, was one less of unbroken continuity than of recursive reflection. The work encouraged audience members to look back at themselves, with self-​scrutiny enabled through time delays and the interpolation of mediation, while its information overload deliberately risked disorienting participants. Although indebted to McLuhan, communication in Simultaneidad en simultaneidad was not necessarily assumed to be straightforwardly instantaneous, but was treated as vulnerable to misunderstandings and power imbalances. Minujín’s Happening attended to entropy, noise, negative feedback and miscommunication in a way that reflects the originary cybernetic thinking of Norbert Wiener, which McLuhan popularised but diluted.16 Simultaneidad en simultaneidad encapsulates the concerns at the heart of this book. The performance generated a sociological survey of its participants that encouraged media literacy, experimenting with the potential for communication technologies to enable relations that, rather than following established patterns of behaviour, might enable individuals to break with routines and initiate new connections. It demonstrates how by 1966 the Happening was profoundly international, rather than the exclusively New York-​based phenomenon it might have seemed on its appearance in the late 1950s, as artists forged a transnational network of heterogeneous, interdisciplinary performances. While the Happening’s obsolescence was rapidly and routinely proclaimed, this book shows how many practitioners continued to work with, but also to contest and contradict, the structures it bequeathed. Figures such as Kaprow, Minujín, Carolee Schneemann and Lea Lublin reflexively retooled the premises of the Happenings during the mid-​1960s and into the 1970s, drawing in different but interconnected ways on contemporaneous sociological and psychological studies of communication, and contributing their own alternative visions of interpersonal exchange to this discourse. The Happenings are dead –​long live the Happenings! By the time Minujín, Kaprow and Vostell were planning their transcontinental performance, reports of the Happening’s demise were widespread. It seemed to many artists and commentators by the mid-​1960s that the energy powering the form was ebbing away, and that it had become irrevocably commoditised.17 These were the suspicions harboured by artists experimenting with the mass media in Buenos Aires who coalesced around the writer and theorist Oscar Masotta, including the members of Arte de los medios de comunicación de masas (Art of the Mass Media).18 Masotta travelled to New York at the end of 1965, staying into spring 1966 (and returning again in 1967), where he conducted fieldwork assisted by guides including the critic Lawrence Alloway, and the art historian and museum director Alan Solomon.19 Masotta’s aims were investigative and critical. He wanted to assess the relevance for the Argentine avant-​garde

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of Pop art and Happenings, both terms that had entered the country as a result of strong internationalising impulses, and that were predominantly associated with the USA.20 The first issue of the glossy magazine Primera plana in 1962 had carried an article on Happenings, which it described as ‘a strange form of theatre in New  York’ and attributed almost entirely to Claes Oldenburg. Significantly, it presented the Happening as an extremely ‘pessimistic’ art form that offered a subversively ‘depressing’ vision of US society, appreciated by intellectuals for the mixture of ‘disgust, sarcasm, sadism and love of destruction’ it offered up for their delectation.21 On returning to Buenos Aires in 1966, Masotta co-​organised a conference and series of Happenings, but he and his collaborators found that, four years after Primera plana’s assessment, the more they researched, ‘the more the impression grew that the possibilities  –​the ideas –​had been exhausted’.22 Rather than create an ‘original’ Happening, they decided to reperform works by Kirby, Oldenburg and Schneemann, guided by Kirby’s 1965 book Happenings:  An Illustrated Anthology.23 Their conclusion: that the next logical step for the Happening was its dissolution into the communications media with which it had become inextricably intertwined.24 Earlier that year in an article for the March 1966 issue of Artforum, Kaprow defended the Happening against charges that it was outmoded and passé. As evidence, he pointed to the widespread adoption of the Happening –​a term he had coined in 1958 and first used as the title of a performance the following year with 18 Happenings in 6 Parts –​by artists across the world: ‘Happenings have been spreading around the globe like some chronic virus, cunningly avoiding the familiar places and occurring where they are least expected.’25 Kaprow had already asserted in a 1965 lecture that ‘Happenings are an international phenomenon’, which had effloresced ‘all over Europe/​Japan/​Argentina/​on the East & West coasts here’.26 Such statements were undeniably self-​promoting, given Kaprow’s status as the so-​called ‘father’ of the Happening, a problematically gendered identification that moreover reductively anchored the form in the USA.27 Although accounts of the Happenings have often focused on New York, artists had established a wide web of performance networks by the middle of the decade, as Kaprow himself was well aware.28 Kaprow’s consciousness of internationalising dynamics permeates his 1966 book Assemblage, Environments and Happenings, which contained images of performances by the Gutai group.29 In her study of the Gutai’s own determined internationalism, Ming Tiampo suggests that Kaprow’s inclusion of the Japanese artists should be viewed not necessarily as ‘an act of appropriation’, but rather as ‘an attempt to enlarge the narrative of art history beyond the Greco-​Roman and Hebraic traditions’.30 Overlapping with the dispersed events by artists associated with Fluxus, often facilitated through the global reach of the mail system, Kaprow’s engagement with performance in Japan and Argentina acknowledges the inherent relationality of the Happening, and

Introduction

its imbrication with the cultural phenomena fuelling transnational exchange, notably communications technologies and ever-​more rapid, accessible travel.31 Growing cross-​cultural collaboration fostered enthusiasm for sociological and psychological models of studying interpersonal relations, as artists working together at short notice for festivals and events sought ways to grapple with the power dynamics of these encounters. Despite Kaprow’s protestations about the Happening’s adaptability, by 1966 the shared consciousness of contemporaneous experiments among artists working in different countries had prompted interrogation, critique and fresh developments.32 Although the Argentina-​born critic Marta Traba, who worked in Colombia for much of the 1960s, dismissed Happenings in Argentina as nothing more than a ‘provincial circus’ on the periphery of US-​ dominated international activity, practitioners productively claimed space in this field, while challenging the structures they encountered.33 Tellingly, it was as Kaprow published his article that Masotta was winding up his New York research. In pronouncing their disenchantment with the Happening, the Argentine artists cited Kaprow’s Artforum essay as a misreading of their situation.34 As Masotta put it in his 1967 lecture ‘After Pop, We Dematerialize’, they discovered ‘something within the Happening that allowed us to glimpse the possibility of its own negation’.35 Their critique resisted co-​option into a globalised, homogenising narrative of the Happening’s success written from a US perspective.36 The situation was, however, more complicated than an unambiguous rebuttal on the part of the Argentine practitioners. The reperformance of US Happenings, Sobre Happenings (On Happenings), occurred at the Di Tella’s art centres as part of the Acerca (de):  ‘Happenings’ (About:  ‘Happenings’) programme of performances and lectures in November 1966.37 Originally scheduled for the summer, it was derailed by General Juan Carlos Onganía’s military coup that June. Fearing persecution, Masotta temporarily abandoned his plans; it also felt ‘a bit embarrassing’ to be making Happenings at such a moment.38 However, he subsequently recanted. By the time Masotta published a group collection of essays on the Happenings in 1967, he had discovered oppositional qualities to them, in the teeth of attacks from left and right. The nature of this oppositionality is indicated by Masotta’s assertion that, ‘it would be difficult to speak of Kaprow, or even of [Roy] Lichtenstein, with the language of Heidegger. The sociological material of the Happening surely calls for a sociological language.’39 Analysing Simultaneidad en simultaneidad, the sociologist Eliseo Verón comparably identified the material of the Happening as ‘social action as a system’, which, he averred, it was not possible to say of other genres, even theatre.40 This echoed Masotta’s sense that the Happening itself operated sociologically as well as constituting a subject for sociological scrutiny, indicating its potential for political engagement.41

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The view from Argentina offers an alternative slant on the Happening’s position in histories of art, which trace a retreat from the interaction it occasioned between the late 1950s and the mid-​1960s into the body-​oriented practices of the 1970s, until participation was ‘re-​discovered’ in social and relational art of the 1990s and 2000s.42 However, the mid-​1960s did not see the smooth codification and categorisation of performance art. Rather, artists during the late 1960s and the 1970s continued to adapt and critique the discoveries of the early Happenings, developing unique modes of performance enmeshed with the study of interpersonal and intrapersonal communication. Interpersonal relations and the counterculture Immediate critical responses to works such as Kaprow’s Spring Happening (1961) and Oldenburg’s 1962 performances at The Store (1961–​ 62) in New York contextualised them as outgrowths of Dada and Surrealism. This lineage was suggested by the chaotic, violent treatment of the audience, and what the critic Jill Johnston described as their ‘mad and vicious’ atmosphere.43 Performers and audiences alike were plunged into disorientating environments filled with junk assemblages and detritus, in which unexpected, unpredictable events occurred. For Susan Sontag, who attended several New York Happenings, they commonly consisted of ‘an asymmetrical network of surprises, without climax or consummation’, which, like the experiments of the interwar European avant-​garde, manifested ‘the alogic of dreams rather than the logic of most art’.44 By contrast, the performances that emerged in the wake of these inchoate, messy and improvisational works were almost scientifically structured, and structural in their vision.45 They responded to, and interrogated, ideas and methodologies drawn from the vibrant discourse of communication studies, as it galvanised multiple disciplines after the Second World War, including sociology, anthropology, mathematics and engineering, psychology, psychiatry and antipsychiatry, as well as revisionist approaches to psychoanalysis. Equally, as early as 1961 Johnston perceptively noted with regard to Happenings that ‘a concern with communication must have played a part in the formative period, and now that concern, or the results at least, assume special importance’.46 The centrality of this concern reflected the growth of communications theory in sociology and psychology during the postwar period, particularly in the USA.47 The New York Times observed in 1961 that the realm of the sociologists had ‘grown mushroom-​like’, as government and managerial enterprises increasingly relied on sociologists and psychologists to execute domestic and international programmes.48 Kristin Ross provocatively posits that, by the 1960s, America’s biggest export was not actually Coca Cola or any of the country’s other iconic commodities, but rather ‘the

Introduction

supremacy of the social sciences’.49 This conjures the discipline’s dominance of the postwar period’s intellectual import and export routes, as well as its significant connections with US imperialism. In Latin America, sociology and psychology underwent dramatic disciplinary and institutional expansion in the late 1950s and 1960s, especially in Argentina, where they were bound up with developmentalist and modernising agendas.50 In Europe, particularly France, sociology had older roots in ethnography and anthropology, but there was widespread fear that technocratic US-​style sociology was gaining the upper hand, even as thinkers such as Henri Lefebvre undertook trenchant critiques of contemporary life.51 The fascination with the problems of communication among artists and critics was closely connected to the demise of medium-​specificity, together with the turn away from formalist analysis toward conceptual approaches that could account for art’s social and political ramifications, and articulate its relational position within what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has influentially termed the ‘field of cultural production’.52 But while communications theory provided important reference points for many artists, and for critics attempting to comprehend the heterogeneity of artistic forms in the 1960s and 1970s, the social sciences were also subjected to sustained questioning. This mirrored concerns that sociology and psychology had become enslaved to Cold War technocracy, following their governmental and military embrace during the Second World War. In 1959, C.  Wright Mills claimed that the social sciences had become corrupted by and complicit with repressive power structures.53 Similarly, Irving Louis Horowitz warned that it would be impossible for sociology to remain impartial as it became ever more embroiled in business agendas.54 The concept of interpersonal communication emerged as a key area of study during the 1930s and 1940s in the work of Harry Stack Sullivan. Sullivan died in 1949, but his lectures on the interpersonal theory of psychiatry were published posthumously in 1953, and propounded the ‘absolutely necessary convergence’ of social psychology and psychiatry as ‘the study of interpersonal interaction’.55 Although influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, Sullivan was convinced that psychology needed to move away from a focus on interiority, which he deemed ultimately unknowable, and instead to address interpersonal situations through participant-​observation. Sullivan’s emphasis on the interpersonal as the site where socialisation played out, and where problems of anxiety and disorder could be most efficaciously addressed, had a significant impact on sociology and psychology. In 1951, the psychiatrist Jurgen Ruesch and anthropologist-​ turned-​ psychologist Gregory Bateson published their coauthored book Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry. It asserted that communication offered ‘the only scientific model which enables us to explain physical, intrapersonal, interpersonal, and cultural aspects of events

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within one system’.56 Communication was ‘the link which connects psychiatry with all other sciences’.57 This fervent belief in the transdisciplinary potential of communication as both a vital subject of sociological and psychological study, and a tool for interpersonal analysis in its own right, developed in tandem with cybernetics, itself conceived of as an interdisciplinary discourse.58 Pioneered by the mathematician Norbert Wiener, cybernetics (from the Greek word for ‘steersman’) is the science of information, communication and control.59 It emerged through Wiener’s work on anti-​aircraft guns at MIT during the Second World War, as he sought to devise responsive systems that could target enemy planes more efficiently. Wiener conceptualised machines as reflexive entities, comparable to –​and integrated with –​organic bodies, deploying this premise to pursue the ever-​more efficient operation of systems through streamlined feedback between machine and environment. This model bound the notion of effective communication to the application of control, as the title of Wiener’s 1948 book Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine explicitly signalled. In his 1950 follow-​up, The Human Use of Human Beings:  Cybernetics and Society, written to make cybernetic precepts more accessible to a general audience, Wiener elaborated:  ‘to live effectively is to live with adequate information. Thus, communication and control belong to the essence of man’s inner life, even as they belong to his life in society.’60 Andrew Pickering recounts how the spectre of control has formed one of the major stumbling blocks in the wider cultural take-​up of cybernetics. He argues that this is a misreading of the discourse, which ignores its ‘nonmodern ontology’ and ‘performative understanding of the brain, mind and self ’.61 However, Wiener’s writings clearly envision self-​reflexive feedback primarily as a ‘method of controlling a system by reinserting into it the results of its past performance’.62 While figures such as Ruesch and Bateson were inspired by the cybernetic focus on communication, they moved away from its formative emphasis on control to advocate for the variegated, unpredictable nature of social and psychological networks. The Happening, this book proposes, was intimately involved in this exploration of communication beyond control as it played out across disciplines and geographies. The dissemination and adaptation of cybernetics occurred in the first instance through the conferences held between 1946 and 1953 funded by the Macy Foundation, which gathered together mathematicians, sociologists, anthropologists and psychologists –​including Bateson and Margaret Mead –​ to explore the wider possibilities of Wiener’s ideas.63 During these discussions, defining communication, and the related concept of information, emerged as chief concerns. For Wiener, communication hinged on ‘the notion of the message’, understood as a ‘continuous sequence of measurable events distributed in time’, liable to contamination by ‘extraneous disturbances’.64

Introduction

Comparably, in the influential model put forward by the mathematician Claude Shannon, effective communication was predicated on the transmission and reception of a message, envisaged as a segment of information distinct from background ‘noise’.65 N. Katherine Hayles assesses how this binary division of communication into intelligible signal versus redundant interference resulted in a restrictive archetype for interaction that prioritised information over interpretation. The separation between signal and noise ‘had a conservative bias that privileges stasis over change’, and ‘implied that change was deviation and that deviation should be corrected’.66 As Peter Galison observes in his study of the relationship between cybernetics and the military context from which it emerged, ‘Wiener thought it obvious that suppressing noise and conveying information should be the central electronic mission.’67 While this made sense when training anti-​aircraft fire, for some of Wiener’s interlocutors it seemed less readily applicable to the nuances and subtleties involved in interpersonal communication. Alternative theories of communication embraced change and considered the communicative aspects of noise, while thinkers such as Bateson emphasised the importance of environments and ecosystems in communication.68 The emergence of second-​ order cybernetics emphasised networked relationality rather than closed-​circuit feedback and homeostasis, as in the 1960s and 1970s many sociologists and psychologists increasingly questioned the discourse’s initial premises.69 While influenced by cybernetic notions of feedback and interconnection, the anthropologist and inventor of kinesics (the study of body-​motion communication), Ray L.  Birdwhistell, stressed that: ‘a human being is not a black box with one orifice for emitting a chunk of stuff called communication and another for receiving it … Communication is not simply the sum of the bits of information which pass between two people in a given period of time’ (italics in original).70 Illustrating this argument, Birdwhistell cited the example of a communication system devised by Paul Revere during the American Revolution, showing how an ostensibly ‘clean informational model’ can rapidly become rife with confusions and uncertainties.71 Revere’s communication system was famously based on the premise that one watchtower light would signal that the British were invading by land, and two by sea. Raising a series of possible queries and qualifications, Birdwhistell argues that this alarm system is too inflexible and limited to be relied on: This is an exceedingly simple model of one phase of the communication process. It is intended only to direct attention to certain problems of communicational analysis. Yet, if we use even this simple example and imagine it multiplied astronomically, we gain some insight into the task faced by a child in becoming a sane member of his society.72

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Birdwhistell’s purpose is twofold: firstly, to contend that communication is not only, or even primarily, verbal, but is fundamentally conditioned by bodily gestures that have physical and psychological effects; and, secondly, to show that communication cannot be simply defined as the transmission of stable units of information, preformed into messages, but is what happens during transmission, and is actively moulded through that process.73 In her landmark study of the relationship between art and time in the 1960s, Pamela M. Lee traces the pervasive influence of the distinct but intersecting discourses of cybernetics and Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s general system theory on creative practice during this decade, emphasising the extent to which what might now seem a somewhat obscure set of references then formed a common currency.74 Thanks to this widespread interest in systems theory and cybernetics, of which the writings of the artist and critic Jack Burnham provide a particularly prominent example, a situation emerged whereby the ‘very problem of communication in general and a problem of communicating history as a system in particular’ became fundamental issues for practitioners and audiences.75 For Birdwhistell, like Bateson and Ruesch, communication could not be neatly divided into primary and secondary channels, with the latter dismissed as mere noise. Such a position, Birdwhistell worried, could all too easily mutate from one ‘that describes certain behavior as redundant’ to one that would define such behaviour as ‘only redundant’ (italics in original).76 Rejecting a clear split between information and interference, Birdwhistell approached interpersonal communication as a process of constant adaption and adjustment, characterised by fine gradations of meaning and sense, directly linked to the specific contexts in which it occurred. The merging of cybernetics with sociology and psychology in ways that revised and reoriented its founding concepts of communication, messages, information and feedback, shaped the work of many artists exploring performance, as well as prompting questioning and contestation. It moreover influenced distinctly countercultural models of interaction that challenged academic sociology and psychology, a shift encapsulated by the transformation of Timothy Leary from Harvard psychologist to countercultural guru. The 1957 study that made Leary’s academic name was concerned with the definition of personality through the analysis of interpersonal relations, combining Sullivan’s earlier emphasis on collective interaction with the work of Karen Horney on character formation.77 The traces of these concerns can be detected  –​albeit radically altered  –​in Leary’s subsequent experimentation with psilocybin and LSD, which redirected the study of interpersonal relations into the exploration of expanded consciousness. The counterculture in turn provided inspiration for artists who considered the problem of communication to be less one of information transmission than a question of the intersection between embodied relationality and psychological states.78

Introduction

In his 1969 study of the counterculture, Theodore Roszak charted the coexistence of behavioural and experiential social analysis along ‘a continuum of thought and experience’. This spanned ‘the New Left sociology of [C. Wright] Mills, the Freudian Marxism of Herbert Marcuse, the Gestalt-​ therapy anarchism of Paul Goodman … the Zen-​based psychotherapy of Alan Watts, and finally Timothy Leary’s impenetrably occult narcissism’. ‘As we move along the continuum’, Roszak observed, ‘we find sociology giving way steadily to psychology, political collectivities yielding to the person, conscious and articulate behavior falling away before the forces of the non-​intellective deep’.79 One of the moments at which Roszak identified these ostensibly very different perspectives converging was the 1967 Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, addressed in Chapter 3, which united proponents of antipsychiatry such as R. D. Laing and David Cooper with Bateson and Marcuse. Leary had observed in Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality that the motivation behind the social scientific obsession with communication was a clear if complex one: prediction.80 In parallel with Leary’s dramatic renunciation of prognostication and control, during the 1960s and 1970s artists sought to explore interactive behaviours, but resisted the predictive ethos with which they were deployed by official apparatuses, exposing their blind spots, particularly with regard to embodied experience and its conditioning through constructs of class, ableism, sexuality, race and gender. The term counterculture is commonly held to have first been coined in a 1960 article entitled ‘Contraculture and Subculture’ by the sociologist J. Milton Yinger. Although ‘contraculture’ eventually became ‘counterculture’, his formulation remains instructive. Yinger was protesting against the inordinate number of situations that were described as ‘subcultural’ in sociology. He recommended that one of these trends should be distinguished by an entirely different construct, suggesting that ‘the creation of a series of inverse or counter values (opposed to those of the surrounding society) in [the] face of serious frustration or conflict’ should henceforth be referred to as ‘contraculture’.81 For all the counterculture’s oppositionality, however, scholars such as Fred Turner have shown how it embraced cybernetic tenets of communication, particularly the vision ‘of a world built not around vertical hierarchies and top-​down flows of power, but around looping circuits of energy and information’.82 This indicates the contradictions involved in the Happening’s transformation into a mechanism of communications analysis. Even as artists attempted to develop new models of interaction, the very tools they used to do so alerted them to their entanglement in structures of technocratic control. Much sociological and psychological material in the 1950s and 1960s treated the white, American, middle-​class, heteronormative family as its primary locus, and the departure point for the identification of ostensible norms. As the 1960s progressed into the 1970s, the limitations of this model became subject to pressure and

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questioning, particularly as a result of the emergence of civil rights followed by the gay and women’s liberation movements, which challenged the ingrained biases of perceived objectivity. The artists in this book complicated contemporaneous debates about communication dominated by the social sciences, while also inevitably at times falling prisoner to their constraints. (Anti)social performances In one of the first critical reassessments of the Happening from the 1990s, Johanna Drucker observed that its material, even in the form’s most aggressive early manifestations, constituted ‘relations among individuals’ (italics in original).83 Judith F. Rodenbeck’s rich study of the connections between Kaprow’s Happenings and their wider sociocultural context expands on Drucker’s insight to argue that the Happenings ‘provided a strong and canny critique of contemporary sociality’.84 Shannon Jackson, meanwhile, argues that the ‘ “performative turn” ’ in contemporary art results from a ‘fundamental interest in the nature of sociality’.85 This, Jackson proposes, has fostered artistic analyses of various social systems, including but not limited to ‘our relation to the environment, kinship, labor, public infrastructure, and social welfare’.86 Communication in art has perhaps been most thoroughly theorised in relation to socially engaged practice of the 1990s and 2000s, from formulations of ‘relationality’ as a medium, to the role of conversation and dialogue in participatory projects.87 What remains to be fully grasped, however, is the extent and intricacy of the relationship among performance art, sociology and psychology in the postwar period, together with the ways in which artists examined the politics of existing social systems in designing their own experimental interpersonal models. Art historians have begun to elucidate the impact of sociological thinking about social interaction and feedback on the development of performance, but the emphasis has been predominantly on the Happenings toward the end of the 1950s and in the early 1960s, rather than on the more explicitly structural and semiological projects of the late 1960s and the 1970s. In his study of Kaprow’s early works, Philip Ursprung demonstrates how Erving Goffman’s writings on self-​presentation informed the artist’s understanding of everyday interaction as inherently theatrical, composed of performative interactions between subjects.88 Performance art’s challenge to the denial of individual bodily autonomy posed by behaviourism has also proven a productive area of study.89 Exemplified by the work of B. F. Skinner, who claimed that ‘a scientific analysis of behavior must … assume that a person’s behavior is controlled by his genetic and environmental histories rather than by the person himself as an initiating, creative agent’, behaviourism was part of the wider pushback in psychology against psychoanalysis, which cybernetics contributed to.90 Its

Introduction

deterministic approach to human relations, however, attracted strong criticism. Equally, the relevance of Bateson’s writing for art practice in the 1960s and 1970s has generated significant insights, while art-​historical engagement with cybernetics has grown steadily.91 These interventions build on a wider body of literature that has tackled the influence of sociology as a source material for Abstract Expressionism, Pop art and assemblage.92 What is distinct about the performative engagements with communication theory addressed in this book is the way in which the resulting works actively sought to contribute to –​and offer alternatives to –​the sociological and psychological study of verbal and nonverbal interrelation, together with their questioning of observational authority.93 In 1977, Kaprow coauthored a proposal entitled ‘The Use of Art Performance as a Model for Personal and Social Awareness’ to unite artists, psychologists, educationalists, communications specialists and videographers into psychosocial research teams. It argues that performance art enables self-​reflexive scrutiny, declaring that the ‘development of a number of participatory models’ by artists, despite having only been considered ‘as art’, in actuality have ‘a much wider applicability in the social and behavioral sciences, as well as industry, government, and education.’94 Invoking Goffman and Birdwhistell, the proposal claims that ‘consciousness … is the goal; consciousness of what has escaped notice’, arguing that artists ‘may offer something distinctly valuable, not specifically as art, but as rich layers of metaphors that appeal to consciousness better than social conventions on the one hand or abstract analysis on the other’ (emphasis in original).95 Beyond the Happening tests such claims, while excavating the journeys Kaprow and others took to reach this point.96 Performance art’s encounter with communication studies was born of the rapid proliferation of communications technologies, which saw practitioners consistently engaging with processes of visualisation, mediation and mediatisation. This marked a development from the initial association of the Happenings with ephemerality and nonreproducibility, framed as an attack on the spectacular images of commodity culture. Nonetheless, the integration of photography, video and documentation with performance grew steadily as the 1960s progressed. Building on the arguments elaborated by Amelia Jones and Philip Auslander that the live event does not necessarily take precedence over performance documentation, and that documentation might itself be invested with performative capacities, scholars have started examining how artists have long experimented with the geographic and temporal avenues of dissemination opened up by reproduction.97 Beyond the Happening contributes to these recuperations of performance mediation, addressing the conceptual and theoretical approaches to imaging employed by artists that remain overlooked even in accounts sensitive to the networked status of performance ephemera.

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The analytical mode of reperformance devised by Masotta and his circle in Buenos Aires was one solution to the impasse that opened up as the dynamism of the early Happenings faded. The transnational connectivity of Simultaneidad en simultaneidad was another. The following chapters consider the trails blazed by Kaprow and Minujín, as well as by Schneemann and Lublin, as they created works in Latin America, Europe and North America. Their paths crossed on occasion: as well as Minujín and Kaprow’s attempted collaboration in 1966, Schneemann reperformed a Happening by Kaprow in 1965, and all three featured in an index of the artists in the Archiv Sohm, with which Harald Szeemann worked when preparing his 1970 survey exhibition Happening & Fluxus.98 Schneemann and Minujín became friends during the latter’s time in New York; Schneemann showed her films as part of Minujín’s 1973 environment 200 Mattresses (The Soft Gallery) in Washington, DC; and they corresponded into the 1980s. Lublin, Minujín and Kaprow all featured in exhibitions during the 1970s organised by the Buenos Aires-​based Centro de Arte y Comunicación (Centre for Art and Communication; CAYC). However, the affinities among their ideas rather than the literal connections between their works are the focus here. By the mid-​to-​late 1960s, Kaprow was questioning his practice and pushing the Happening in unprecedented directions, combining it with radical pedagogy. Despite his oft-​cited ambivalence toward mediation, Kaprow started incorporating the act of taking photographs into the structure of his works, as a way of generating sociological knowledge and facilitating cultural interaction. Beyond the Happening’s first chapter explores how sociological writings on education and nonverbal communication, together with conceptual art experiments in photography, informed the performances Kaprow designed between 1968 and 1969 as part of a pedagogic project in Berkeley with the educator Herbert R. Kohl. In these works, Kaprow explored the politics of the image within communication, examining its role in intrapersonal and interpersonal subject formation. Chapter 2 returns to Minujín’s work, tracing her increasingly countercultural approach to communication after Simultaneidad en simultaneidad. It begins by analysing Minujín’s two other sociological media Happenings of the late 1960s –​ Circuit (Super Heterodyne) (1967) and Minucode (1968) –​before turning to her performances of the early 1970s in New York and Washington, DC. Together, these comprise an extended study of sociability, which addressed the vagaries of cultural capital under the pressures of Cold War soft diplomacy, as well as the experiences of exile and alienation. Minujín capitalised on the popularity of sociology and psychology in the USA and Argentina, while subverting these disciplines’ coercive dynamics by inciting improvisatory relations between participants, resulting in a search for transcendence and communality, even if an admittedly compromised one.

Introduction

The third chapter focuses on Carolee Schneemann, who, like Minujín and Kaprow, played a vital role in the development of performance art beyond the Happening. Schneemann’s ‘Kinetic Theatre’, which concentrated on the dynamics of group collaboration and sensitisation, evolved in dialectical relation to contemporary psychotherapeutic models. Despite embracing interrelation, Schneemann’s collective performances diverge from the feedback operations of cybernetic psychology and antipsychiatry. This became especially pronounced during her 1967 Happening in London at the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, but was present from early performances such as Labyrinth (1960) and Newspaper Event (1963). The chapter’s conclusion argues that, although Schneemann stopped making group work in 1970, the subversion of sociology and psychology pioneered in her collaborative performances became an important feminist tool. Chapter  4 extends this focus on the feminist politics of communication in relation to the work of Lea Lublin. Lublin grew up in Argentina before relocating to France during the 1950s; in the 1960s and 1970s, she exhibited in Latin America and Europe. Amid the protests, strikes and occupations of May 1968, Lublin installed herself with her baby in the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris. This action sparked multiple projects that sought to denaturalise received social processes, images and ideologies, particularly the concretisation of communicative habits and gestures. These encompass Lublin’s participatory environmental installations in Argentina and Chile from the late 1960s into the early 1970s, and her increasingly feminist-​oriented work in France. Lublin’s studies of social and artistic communication parallel those of the Collectif d’art sociologique (Sociological Art Collective) in France, and were incorporated into the cybernetic and systems frameworks for performance and conceptual art devised by CAYC. Yet Lublin’s commitment to questioning received social processes ultimately differed significantly from both enterprises, because of its fusion of materialist and psychoanalytic feminist concerns. In his 1966 article, Kaprow laid out ground rules for what did and did not constitute a Happening. These included his oft-​repeated mantra that the ‘line between the Happening and daily life’ should be ‘kept as fluid and perhaps indistinct as possible’; the conviction that the materials used should be everyday items; and the stipulation that ‘the composition of all materials, actions, images, and their times and spaces, should be undertaken in as artless, and … practical, a way as possible’.99 Happenings were ‘unrehearsed’, ‘once-​only’ events; the only evidence would be ‘the stories they multiply’, together with ‘the printed scenarios and occasional photographs of works that shall have passed on forever’.100 The following chapters show how, in the ensuing years, Kaprow and others stretched these parameters to breaking point, as they studied physical and psychological communication ever more obsessively.

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Notes 1 In 1964 Kaprow and Vostell presented a joint lecture entitled ‘The Art of the Happening’ at the Cricket Theater, New York, followed by a performance of Vostell’s violent Happening You at King’s Point, Long Island. Allan Kaprow and Wolf Vostell, ‘The Art of the Happening,’ 19 April 1964, Box 70, Folder 3, Allan Kaprow Papers (980063), Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Kaprow met Minujín when she travelled to New York in 1965–​66. Kaprow conveyed his professional excitement about the connection in a letter to the French critic Pierre Restany, an important conduit between the artists in this book: ‘with Marta Minujín and Wolf Vostell I’m also planning a 3-​country collaborative Happening –​but you probably know about this. I’m also working on another collaboration here for August. An artist at last!!!’ Allan Kaprow, letter to Pierre Restany, 22 June 1966, PREST THE PER 002 (1/​8), Fonds Pierre Restany, INHA-​Collection Archives de la critique d’art, Rennes. 2 The first Telstar satellite was launched in July 1962, enabling live transatlantic televisual broadcast. Its promise was synchronicity; on the occasion of the first live broadcast from the UK to the USA, the American CBS network proclaimed that the satellite was ushering in ‘an era in which television will span oceans and continents to bring back images and sounds of distant events at the very time they are taking place’ (italics in original). CBS Television Network advertisement, ‘It Was Only Eight Minutes Long …’, The Times (21 July 1962): 5. The Early Bird Intelsat satellite was launched in 1965, and in 1967 it realised the vision entertained by Kaprow, Minujín and Vostell when it hosted a simultaneous television broadcast entitled Our World among nineteen different countries, which concluded with The Beatles singing All You Need Is Love. Marshall McLuhan, who appeared in the broadcast, referenced satellites like Telstar and Intelsat as examples of the new communications connectivity: ‘The worldpool of information fathered by electric media  –​movies, Telstar, flight  –​far surpasses any possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear.’ Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage (London: Penguin, 2008 [1967]), 14. 3 On his 1966 LP ‘How to Make a Happening,’ Kaprow presented the Happening as an intrinsically peripatetic activity, envisioning performances multiplying from house to street, ‘then on more than one street. Then in different but nearby cities. Finally all around the world. Some of this can take place travelling from one area to another, using public transportation and the mails.’ Allan Kaprow, How to Make a Happening (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute and Primary Information, 2008 [1966]), CD. 4 Pichon-​Rivière achieved celebrity status with his application of psychoanalysis to group therapy. He regularly attended events at the Di Tella, and between 1966 and 1967 wrote a column in Primera plana magazine on the social psychology of everyday life. Mariano Ben Plotkin, Freud in the Pampas:  The Emergence and Development of a Psychoanalytic Culture in Argentina (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 105–​7. 5 ‘el bosque de antenas vibraba como bambúes metálicos.’ ‘Happenings: El gabinete de la doctora Minujín,’ Primera plana 4, no. 199 (18 October 1966): 77. All translations from Spanish and French are my own, unless otherwise indicated.

Introduction

6 The writer Bernardo Verbitsky described Minujín as ‘una especie de cosmonauta con overol al parecer metalizado’. Bernardo Verbitsky, ‘Un espectáculo revolucionario’, Confirmado (3 November 1965):  53, Box 69, Folder 4, Allan Kaprow Papers. On visions of futurity in Argentine art of the 1960s, see Rodrigo Alonso, ‘Argentines on the Moon’, trans. Janice Jaffe, in Past Futures: Science Fiction, Space Travel and Postwar Art of the Americas, ed. Sarah J. Montross (Brunswick, ME:  Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 2015), 76–​88; and in the early twentieth century, Beatriz Sarlo, La imaginación técnica:  Sueños modernos de la cultura Argentina (Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión, 1992). 7 ‘cada asistente era prolijamente fotografiado y filmado, de frente y de perfil … La segunda fase preliminar consistió en la grabación de las voces: cada invitado dijo su nombre ante el micrófono, y dio su opinión ante lo que estaba ocurriendo.’ ‘Happenings: El gabinete de la doctora Minujín’, 77. 8 Marta Minujín, untitled description of Simultaneidad en simultaneidad, n.d., Box 69, Folder 4, Allan Kaprow Papers. 9 Some reports list the second station as Radio Excelsior. 10 Michael Kirby, ‘Marta Minujín’s “Simultaneity in Simultaneity”’, The Drama Review: TDR 12, no. 3 (Spring 1968): 148–​52 (151–​2). 11 Ibid., 152. 12 Marta Minujín, untitled text for Simultaneidad en simultaneidad, with a note stating ‘this text was read at Radio Municipal’, n.d., Proyectos de Obra I, 1960–70, Archivo Especial Marta Minujín, Fundación Espigas, Buenos Aires. This echoes McLuhan’s countercultural vision of how the mass media extended the individual’s central nervous system into ‘a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned’. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994 [1964]), 3. Minujín has related that she attended Oscar Masotta’s lectures and reading groups, describing how ‘we were reading a lot of [Claude] Lévi-​Strauss and also Ferdinand de Saussure, and Marshall McLuhan, whose book Understanding Media was very important to us’. Marta Minujín, ‘1,000 Words: Marta Minujín Talks about Minucode, 1968’, with an introduction by Daniel R. Quiles, Artforum International 48, no. 8 (April 2010): 156–​9 (158). Comparably, in an interview with Richard Schechner published alongside Kirby’s account of Simultaneidad en simultaneidad, Kaprow related that there was a ‘very strong relation’ between McLuhan’s ideas and his works, noting their shared interest in the connectivity created by the experience of viewing television, with the caveat that ‘the TV community is passive and I am interested in a variety of modes including contemplation, observation, and participation.’ Allan Kaprow, ‘Extensions in Time and Space’, interview by Richard Schechner, The Drama Review: TDR 12, no. 3 (Spring 1968): 153–​9 (155). This qualified an earlier exchange during which Kaprow accused Schechner and Kirby of oversimplifying McLuhan’s influence in their 1965 special issue on Happenings, asserting that, ‘so far as I  know, he has had no effect upon the Happenings at all’. Allan Kaprow, ‘On Happenings’, letter to the Editor, Tulane Drama Review 10, no.  4 (Summer

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1966):  281–​3 (283). Michael Kirby’s ‘The New Theatre’ and Richard Schechner’s ‘Happenings’ can be found in Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 2 (Winter 1965): 23–​43 and 229–​32 respectively. 13 ‘el contexto de su casa, de su vida personal, es el aspecto privado, mientras que el medio es, justamente, la irrupción temporaria de lo colectivo en ese contexto privado’ (emphasis in original). Marta Minujín, ‘Notas sobre la situación preparatoria del happening sobre “invasión de los medios masivos” ’, n.d., Proyectos de Obra I, 1960–70, Archivo Especial Marta Minujín. 14 Niko Vicario posits that Simultaneidad en simultaneidad sought ‘to eliminate what had been diagnosed as the lag time between artistic centers (or what were sometimes seen as centers and peripheries)’. Niko Vicario, ‘Oscar Bony’s La familia obrera: The Labor and the Work’, ARTMargins 6, no. 2 (June 2017): 50–​7 1 (60). 15 Kirby, ‘Marta Minujín’s “Simultaneity in Simultaneity” ’, 152. 16 Fred Turner observes that McLuhan ‘drew extensively’ on Wiener’s work, as well as on Jurgen Ruesch and Gregory Bateson’s Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychology (1951). Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 52–​3. 17 Judith F. Rodenbeck cites the 1967 pulp novel The Happening –​itself adapted from a film –​as evidence of ‘just how far the term “happening” … had drifted from its initial usage.’ Judith F. Rodenbeck, Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), ix. 18 On Masotta and Arte de los medios, which comprised Eduardo Costa, Roberto Jacoby and Raúl Escari, see Ana Longoni and Mariano Mestman, ‘After Pop, We Dematerialize:  Oscar Masotta, Happenings, and Media Art at the Beginnings of Conceptualism’, trans. Linda Phillips, in Listen, Here, Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s:  Writings of the Avant-​Garde, ed. Inés Katzenstein (New  York:  Museum of Modern Art, 2004), 156–​72. See also Karen Benezra, ‘Media Art in Argentina: Ideology and Critique “Después del pop”’, ARTMargins 1, nos 2–​3 (June–​October 2012): 152–​75. 19 Oscar Masotta, ‘Proyecto de trabajo sobre “artes visuales y medios de comunicación de masas” (lugar de la investigación: N. York)’, n.d., 1, Box 3, Folder 11, AR BDT 1970 CEA EA, Fondo Centro de Experimentación Audiovisual, Archivos del Instituto Di Tella, Biblioteca Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires. Andrea Giunta gives a detailed account of Masotta’s time in New York in Avant-​Garde, Internationalism, and Politics:  Argentine Art in the Sixties, trans. Peter Kahn (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2007 [2001]), 180–​8. 20 On Masotta’s diverse intellectual interests, see Philip Derbyshire, ‘Who Was Oscar Masotta? Psychoanalysis in Argentina’, Radical Philosophy 158 (November–​ December 2009): 11–​23. Responding to this article, Daniel R. Quiles stresses the need to integrate Masotta’s philosophical outlook with his involvement in art practice. Daniel R. Quiles, ‘Who Was Oscar Masotta? Response to Derbyshire’, Radical Philosophy 164 (November–​December 2010): 60. Ana Longoni tracks the development of Masotta’s thinking with regard to Pop art, Happenings and Arte

Introduction

de los medios in ‘Oscar Masotta: Vanguardia y revolución en los sesenta’, in Oscar Masotta, Revolución en el arte: Pop-​art, happenings y arte de los medios en la década del sesenta (Buenos Aires: Edhasa, 2004), 9–​100. Claire Bishop considers his anti-​ Happenings in Artificial Hells:  Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), 105–​28; as does Olivier Debroise in ‘Looking at the Sky in Buenos Aires’, Getty Research Journal 1 (2009): 127–​36. Critical interest in Masotta has expanded into exhibitions: his work featured in Documenta 14 (2017) at the Athens Conservatoire (Odeion), while Oscar Masotta: Theory as Action appeared at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) in 2018. 21 ‘Ninguna película, ninguna caricatura, ofrece un pesimismo más incurable que el Happening. Ninguna descripción más deprimente de los Estados Unidos. Los intelectuales aprecian esta mezcla sutil de disgusto, de sarcasmo, de sadismo y de amor a la destrucción.’ ‘Una extraña forma de teatro en Nueva York: El happening’, Primera plana 1, no. 1 (13 November 1962): 31–​4 (33). 22 ‘A medida que aumentaba nuestra información crecía la impresión de que las posibilidades –​las ideas –​se hallaban agotadas. La idea de no hacer un happening original, entonces, sino la de reunir en un happening varios happenings ya realizados, nos pareció, de pronto, más importante’ (italics in original). Eduardo Costa and Oscar Masotta, ‘Sobre happenings, happening: Reflexiones y relatos’, in Oscar Masotta, Marta Minujín, Alicia Páez, Roberto Jacoby, Eliseo Verón, Eduardo Costa et al., Happenings (Buenos Aires: Jorge Álvarez, 1967), 177–​82 (177). 23 Kirby’s collection of essays and scores appeared as Michael Kirby, ed., Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1965). 24 Happening para un jabalí difunto (Happening for a Dead Boar) (1966) by Costa, Escari and Jacoby, consisted purely of documentation without an originary event, addressing the extent to which Happenings had become mediatised. Masotta pointed to ‘the difference between the Happening and “media art” ’, while stressing that ‘the idea of making works of the latter type was already indicated in Happenings and that the passage emerged as a “logical consequence” ’. Oscar Masotta, ‘After Pop, We Dematerialize’ (1967), excerpted, trans. Eileen Brockbank, in Katzenstein, Listen, Here, Now!, 208–​16 (214). 25 Allan Kaprow, ‘The Happenings Are Dead –​Long Live the Happenings!’, Artforum 4, no. 7 (March 1966): 36–​9 (37). Kaprow coined the term in his essay ‘The Legacy of Jackson Pollock’, which proclaimed that Pollock’s experimentation had opened art up to ‘entirely unheard-​of happenings and events’. Allan Kaprow, ‘The Legacy of Jackson Pollock’ (1958), in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 1–​9 (9). 26 Allan Kaprow, ‘New Goals and Techniques of Happenings’, 8 March 1965, New York, Box 47, Folder 5, Allan Kaprow Papers. 27 Philip Ursprung stresses that ‘as the “father” of the Happening and as one of the most influential figures in American college life, this heterosexual white artist … embodied a distinctly patriarchal structure’. Philip Ursprung, Allan Kaprow, Robert Smithson, and the Limits to Art, trans. Fiona Elliott (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 51.

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28 Contemporaneous knowledge of the form’s internationalism has frequently been overlooked in favour of a US focus. See for example Mildred L. Glimcher, Happenings:  New  York, 1958–​1963 (New  York:  Monacelli Press, 2012); Mike Sell, Avant-​Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism:  Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings/​Fluxus, and the Black Arts Movement (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005); and Mariellen R. Sandford, ed., Happenings and Other Acts (London:  Routledge, 1995). For histories that articulate the transnational networks in which Happenings were created, see Bishop’s Artificial Hells; Deborah Cullen, ed., Arte ≠ Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960–​2000 (New York: El Museo del Barrio, 2008); and Midori Yoshimoto, Into Performance:  Japanese Women Artists in New York (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005). On the African and Asian influences on performance works created in California, see Kellie Jones, South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 185–​263. See also the scholarship on performance art in Central and Eastern Europe, especially Amy Bryzgel, Performance Art in Eastern Europe since 1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017); and Klara Kemp-​Welch, Antipolitics in Central European Art: Reticence as Dissidence under Post-​Totalitarian Rule, 1956–​1989 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), particularly 13–​56 on Tadeusz Kantor and his Sea Happening of 1967. 29 Allan Kaprow, ‘Nine Japanese of the Gutai Group’, in Assemblage, Environments and Happenings (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1966), 211–​25. 30 Ming Tiampo, Gutai:  Decentering Modernism (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2011), 90. On internationalism and the concept of the ‘contemporary’ in 1960s Japan, see also Reiko Tomii, Radicalism in the Wilderness:  International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). 31 Fluxus activity played an important role in establishing performance networks across geographic and cultural borders. Jessica Santone points to George Maciunas’s facilitation of a vast artistic correspondence network that ‘opened an event to the operations and effects of distributed authorship in an art community’. Jessica Santone, ‘Archiving Fluxus Performances in Mieko Shiomi’s Spatial Poem’, in Across the Great Divide: Modernism’s Intermedialities, from Futurism to Fluxus, ed. Rhys Davies, Christopher Townsend and Alex Trott (Newcastle upon Tyne:  Cambridge Scholars, 2014), 120–​36 (122). See also Colby Chamberlain, ‘International Indeterminacy: George Maciunas and the Mail’, ARTMargins 9, no. 3 (2018): 57–​85. 32 Alloway highlighted these shifts in relation to Assemblage, Environments and Happenings. Reviewing the book, he meditated on the lag between Kaprow’s first drafts and the eventual publication in 1966 (the manuscript was written in 1959–​60, and redrafted in 1961), observing that its ideas were out of sync with the ways in which the Happenings –​Kaprow’s included –​had developed. Alloway refuted the ‘escalation ladder’ implied by Kaprow’s title from assemblage sculpture through environments to Happenings, deeming his performances by this point to bear scant resemblance to the ‘Junk Culture’ of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Lawrence Alloway, ‘Allan Kaprow, Two Views’ (first published as two separate pieces:  ‘Art

Introduction

in Escalation: The History of Happenings. A Question of Sources’, Arts Magazine 42, no. 3 (December 1966–​January 1967): 40–​3; and ‘Art’, The Nation (20 October 1969)), in Topics in American Art since 1945 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1975): 195–​200  (196). 33 Marta Traba, Dos décadas vulnerables en las artes plásticas latinoamericanas, 1950–​ 1970 (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2005 [1973]), 195. On the development of Traba’s nationalist position, and her critique of Pop, Conceptual art and Happenings, which she ‘associated exclusively –​and erroneously –​with the United States’, see Florencia Bazzano-​Nelson, ‘Marta Traba:  Internationalism or Regional Resistance?’, Art Journal 64, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 87–​8 (88). See also Mari Carmen Ramírez, ‘Sobre la pertinencia actual de una crítica comprometida’, trans. Héctor Olea, in Traba, Dos décadas vulnerables,  33–​54. 34 In the prologue to the 1967 collection of essays on Happenings, Masotta referenced Kaprow’s assertions in the 1966 Artforum essay, arguing that despite his claim that Argentina was overflowing with ‘happenistas’, at that point a very small number of performances had actually occurred there. (‘El happening aparece en la Argentina marcado por una extraña suerte. Allan Kaprow hace un año atrás se refería a nosotros poco menos que como a un país de happenistas, en tanto que hasta esa fecha apenas si existían en la Argentina manifestaciones expresas del género.’) Oscar Masotta, ‘Prólogo’, in Masotta et al., Happenings, 9. The Acerca (de): ‘Happenings’ pamphlet  also cited Kaprow’s Artforum essay. Pamphlet for Acerca (de): ‘Happenings’, 1966, Box 3, Folder 11, AR BDT 1970 CEA EA, Fondo Centro de Experimentación Audiovisual, Archivos del Instituto Di Tella. 35 Masotta, ‘After Pop, We Dematerialize’, 213. Quiles describes this lecture as ‘in part a manifesto for a new, exclusively Argentine art founded on the ruins of the happening’. Daniel R. Quiles, ‘My Reference is Prejudiced:  David Lamelas’s Publication’, ARTMargins 2, no. 3 (October 2013): 31–​62 (39). 36 Patrick Greaney contends that engagements with the Happening in Argentina depended ‘on complex forms of imitation and inversion’. As such, they ‘were created in response to art from elsewhere, but not as a naïve imitation or attempt to do better than the original’, and constitute ‘critical repetitions that reflect on art from North America and Europe; react to local conditions; and create and theorize new genres of art’. Patrick Greaney, ‘Essentially the Same:  Eduardo Costa’s Minimal Differences and Latin American Conceptualism’, Art History 37, no. 4 (September 2014):  648–​65 (659). See also Daniel R. Quiles, ‘Dead Boars, Viruses, and Zombies: Roberto Jacoby’s Art History’, Art Journal 73, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 38–​55. 37 The programme was realised by the Centres for Visual Art and Audio-​Visual Experimentation, and included Masotta’s Happening Para inducir el espíritu de imagen (To Induce the Spirit of the Image) and Mario Gandelsonas’s Señales (Signals). Pamphlet for Acerca (de): ‘Happenings’, 1966. 38 ‘por otra parte, era un poco vergonzoso, en medio de la gravedad de la situación política, hacer “happenings” ’. Oscar Masotta, ‘Yo cometí un happening’, in Masotta et al., Happenings, 157–​73 (170).

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39 ‘Pero sería difícil poder hablar de Kaprow, o aún de Lichtenstein, con el lenguaje de Heidegger. La materia sociológica del happening reclama seguramente el lenguaje de la sociología.’ Masotta, ‘Prólogo’, 12. 40 ‘En este sentido, aventuraré la hipótesis de que la materia del género happening (y lo que lo diferencia de otros géneros) es la acción social como sistema. Pienso que esto no puede afirmarse de ningún otro género, ni aún del teatro’ (italics in original). Eliseo Verón, ‘Un happening de los medios masivos: Notas para un análisis semántico’, in Masotta et al., Happenings, 75–​90 (79). 41 This was admittedly not on the scale of the activism pursued by artists radicalised by Onganía’s repressive policies. Longoni and Mestman trace the overlapping stages of Argentine avant-​garde activity during the 1960s, proposing that these culminated in the ‘itinerary’ of 1968, a period between April and November that year that witnessed multiple fusions between art and politics. These included the boycott of Experiencias 68 at the Di Tella in response to censorship; the Ciclo de Arte Experimental (Cycle of Experimental Art) organised by the Grupo de Artistas de Vanguardia in Rosario; and Tucumán arde (Tucuman is Burning), also in Rosario and briefly Buenos Aires before it was shut down. See Ana Longoni and Mariano Mestman, Del Di Tella a ‘Tucumán arde’: Vanguardia artística y política en el 68 argentino (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 2013 [2000]), particularly the timeline on 250. 42 On body art see Kathy O’Dell, Contract with the Skin:  Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Amelia Jones, Body Art/​Performing the Subject (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1998); and Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (London: Routledge, 1997). For key studies that have connected participatory practice of the 1990s and 2000s with 1960s experiments, see Bishop, Artificial Hells; Anna Dezeuze, Almost Nothing:  Observations on Precarious Practices in Contemporary Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017); and Anna Dezeuze, ed., The ‘Do-​It-​Yourself ’ Artwork:  Participation from Fluxus to New Media (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). 43 Jill Johnston, ‘Theatre: Natural History (Dreams)’ (1965), in Marmalade Me, rev. edn (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998 [1971]), 47–​8 (48). 44 Susan Sontag, ‘Happenings:  An Art of Radical Juxtaposition’ (1962), in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New  York:  Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), 263–​74  (266). 45 Claude Lévi-​Strauss’s structural anthropology was an important reference point for the Argentine avant-​garde. Masotta’s 1965 lectures on Pop art, published in 1967, make reference to the anthropologist’s writings on myth. See Oscar Masotta, El ‘pop art’ (Buenos Aires: Editorial Columba, 1967). 46 Jill Johnston, ‘“Happenings”:  Ingenious Womb’, Village Voice 6, no. 24 (6 April 1961): 13. 47 Seth Barry Watter notes that during and after the Second World War, ‘communication’ as a designation ‘had grown catholic indeed’ as it became an obsession among artists and scientists alike. Seth Barry Watter, ‘Scrutinizing: Film and the Microanalysis of Behavior’, Grey Room 66 (Winter 2017): 32–​69 (36).

Introduction

48 Russell Kirk, ‘Is Social Science Scientific?’, New  York Times (25 June 1961):  SM11, 15–​16, 18 (SM11). On sociology’s connections to the US military-​ industrial complex, see David Paul Haney, The Americanization of Social Science:  Intellectuals and Public Responsibility in the Postwar United States (Philadelphia:  Temple University Press, 2008); Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion:  Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945–​1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Stephen Park Turner and Jonathan H. Turner, The Impossible Science: An Institutional Analysis of American Sociology (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1990). 49 Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 186. 50 Sociology played a crucial role in US interventions in Latin America, as addressed in Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology:  American Social Science and ‘Nation Building’ in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 51 Johan Heilbron describes how the boom in applied sociology and its adoption by government and business in France was closely linked to the US Marshall Plan and its ‘productivity missions’ between 1949 and 1956, ‘which contributed to an accelerated import and adaptation of American technology and management models’. Johan Heilbron, French Sociology (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 2015), 130. 52 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Field of Cultural Production; or, The Economic World Reversed’ (1983), trans. Richard Nice, in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 29–​73. See for example Lawrence Alloway, ‘The Long Front of Culture’ (1959), in Imagining the Present: Context, Content, and the Role of the Critic, ed. Richard Kalina (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 61–​4. 53 Mills defended ‘the sociological imagination’, understood as the ability to conceptualise the connections between the minutiae of everyday life and shifts in wider social structures, against the ‘bureaucratic ethos’ of a technocratic sociology concerned with prediction and control, used ‘in and for nondemocratic areas of society –​a military establishment, a corporation, an advertising agency, an administrative division of government’. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 114. This critique continued in titles such as Loren Baritz, The Servants of Power:  A History of the Use of Social Science in American Industry (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1965). 54 Irving Louis Horowitz, ‘Sociology for Sale’ (1963), in Professing Sociology: Studies in the Life Cycle of Social Science (Chicago: Aldine, 1968), 167–​73. 55 Harry Stack Sullivan, The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry, ed. Helen Swick Perry and Mary Ladd Gawel (New York: W. W. Norton, 1953), 18. The OED cites Sullivan in 1938 as the first use of the word ‘to describe behaviour between people in any encounter’. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. ‘interpersonal, adj.’, www.oed. com/​view/​Entry/​98146 (accessed 19 January 2020).

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56 Jurgen Ruesch and Gregory Bateson, Communication:  The Social Matrix of Psychiatry (New York: W. W. Norton, 1951), 5. 57 Ibid. 58 Geof Bowker, ‘How to Be Universal: Some Cybernetic Strategies, 1943–​70’, Social Studies of Science 23, no. 1 (February 1993): 107–​27 (116). 59 Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, rev. edn (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1954 [1950]), 15. 60 Ibid., 18. 61 Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain:  Sketches of Another Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 13. 62 Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 61. 63 Steve Joshua Heims traces how the conferences became increasingly split between the mathematic cyberneticists, who leaned toward behaviourist models of interaction, and the social sciences cluster, which was sceptical of behaviourism. Steve Joshua Heims, The Cybernetics Group (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 1991), 1–​13. 64 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965 [1948]), 8–​9, 10. 65 Shannon’s model of communication was one in which ‘the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages’ (italics in original), whereby information was distinguished from noise. Claude Shannon, ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’, Bell System Technical Journal 27, no. 3 (July 1948): 379–​423  (379). 66 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 63. 67 Peter Galison, ‘The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision’, Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (Autumn 1994): 228–​66 (240). 68 William R.  Kaizen describes how in Communication Ruesch and Bateson were ‘working against … the disembodiment of information in the mathematical formulation of communication’. William R.  Kaizen, ‘Steps to an Ecology of Communication:  Radical Software, Dan Graham, and the Legacy of Gregory Bateson’, Art Journal 67, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 86–​107 (93). 69 Second-​wave cybernetics ‘grew out of attempts to incorporate reflexivity into the  cybernetic paradigm at a fundamental level’. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 10. 70 Ray L. Birdwhistell, ‘There Was a Child Went Forth …’ (1959), in Kinesics and Context:  Essays on Body-​ Motion Communication (London:  Allen Lane 1971), 3–​11  (3). 7 1 Ray L.  Birdwhistell, ‘ “Redundancy” in Multichannel Communication Systems’ (1962), in Kinesics and Context, 89. 72 Ibid., 91. 73 The cognitive scientist Colin Cherry reached a similar conclusion: ‘communication is not the response itself but is essentially the relationship set up by the transmission

Introduction

of stimuli and the evocation of responses’ (italics in original). Colin Cherry, On Human Communication: A Review, a Survey, and a Criticism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978 [1957]), 6–​7. 74 Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia:  On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 238. Manfred Drack and David Pouvreau give a detailed overview of the similarities and contrasts between system theory and cybernetics, stressing that their relationship is one of ‘gradual differences’ rather than ‘sharp borders’. Manfred Drack and David Pouvreau, ‘On the History of Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s “General Systemology”, and on Its Relationship to Cybernetics –​Part III:  Convergences and Divergences’, International Journal of General Systems 44, no. 5 (2015): 523–​7 1 (524). 75 Lee, Chronophobia, 238–​9. Jack Burnham’s most well-​known essay is his 1968 Artforum publication ‘Systems Esthetics’ (Artforum 7, no. 1 (September 1968): 30–​ 5), but he had already explored these ideas in writings that speculated that technological developments were too rigid and ‘unadaptable’, and were destroying earlier organic networks. Jack Burnham, ‘Sculpture, Systems, and Catastrophe’ (1966), in Dissolve into Comprehension: Writings and Interviews, 1964–​2004, ed. Melissa Ragain (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 2015), 81–​8 (88). On Burnham’s use of general system theory, see Luke Skrebowski, ‘All Systems Go:  Recovering Jack Burnham’s “Systems Aesthetics”’, Tate Papers 5 (2006), www.tate.org.uk/​research/​ publications/​tate-​papers/​05/​all-​systems-​go-​recovering-​jack-​burnhams-​systems-​ aesthetics (accessed 17 January 2020). On art and systems theory more generally, see Francis Halsall, Systems of Art: Art, History and Systems Theory (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008); and Donna De Salvo, ed., Open Systems:  Rethinking Art c.  1970 (London: Tate, 2005). 76 Birdwhistell, ‘ “Redundancy” in Multichannel Communication Systems’, 86. 77 Leary focused on the role of anxiety in interpersonal relations, based on the Sullivan-​inspired premise that ‘all the social, emotional, interpersonal activities of an individual can be understood as attempts to avoid anxiety or to establish and maintain self-​esteem’. Timothy Leary, Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality: A Functional Theory and Methodology for Personality Evaluation (New  York:  John Wiley & Sons, 1957), 59. 78 Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner note that the visual and performative manifestations of the counterculture have regularly been deemed irrelevant to politics, and simultaneously excluded from artistic narratives of the 1960s. Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner, ‘Introduction. The Counterculture Experiment:  Consciousness and Encounters at the Edge of Art’, in West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965–​ 1977, ed. Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press and Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, 2012), xvii–​xxxvi (xxi). 79 Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (London: Faber, 1970), 64. 80 Leary, Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality, 51.

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81 J. Milton Yinger, ‘Contraculture and Subculture’, American Sociological Review 25, no. 5 (October 1960): 625–​35 (627). 82 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 38. 83 Johanna Drucker, ‘Collaboration without Object(s) in the Early Happenings’, Art Journal 52, no. 4 (Winter 1993): 51–​8 (51). 84 Rodenbeck, Radical Prototypes, ix. 85 Shannon Jackson, Social Works:  Performing Art, Supporting Publics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 2. 86 Ibid., 6. 87 See Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods, with Mathieu Copeland (Dijon:  Les Presses du réel, 2002 [1998]); and Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013 [2004]). 88 Ursprung, Allan Kaprow, Robert Smithson, and the Limits to Art, 10–​12. Rodenbeck also notes Goffman’s importance  –​notably The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) –​for Kaprow’s early work. Rodenbeck, Radical Prototypes, 163. Carrie Lambert-​ Beatty comparably observes the impact of Goffman’s elaboration of ‘copresence’ on the Judson Dance Theater’s turn to everyday gestures in Being Watched:  Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 2008), 24. On ‘copresence’, see Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings (New York: Free Press, 1963), 17. 89 For an insightful reading of Vito Acconci’s performances as a manifestation of antibehaviourist sentiments, see Elise Archias, The Concrete Body: Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, Vito Acconci (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 157–​ 60. This builds on Kate Linker’s connections between Acconci’s work and Edward T. Hall’s study of proxemics in The Hidden Dimension (1966), Goffman’s Interaction Ritual (1967), and Kurt Lewin’s Principles of Topographical Psychology (1966 [1936]). Kate Linker, Vito Acconci (New York: Rizzoli, 1994), 30–​5. 90 B. F. Skinner, About Behaviourism (London: Jonathan Cape, 1974), 189. 91 On Bateson, as well as Kaizen, see James Nisbet, Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 157–​63. Jasia Reichardt’s 1968 Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London has formed a focus of critical analysis; see María Fernández, ‘Detached from HiStory: Jasia Reichardt and Cybernetic Serendipity’, Art Journal 67, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 6–​23. For other investigations of art and cybernetics, see Yates McKee, ‘The Public Sensoriums of Pulsa: Cybernetic Abstraction and the Biopolitics of Urban Survival’, Art Journal 67, no. 3 (Fall 2008):  46–​67; and Margit Rosen, ‘Gordon Pask’s Cybernetic Systems:  Conversations after the End of the Mechanical Age’, in Practicable:  From Participation to Interaction in Contemporary Art, ed. Samuel Bianchini and Erik Verhagen, with the collaboration of Nathalie Delbard and Larisa Dryansky (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 2016),  25–​38.

Introduction

92 Marcia Brennan connects David Riesman’s sociological study The Lonely Crowd:  A Study of the Changing American Character (1950) with the New  York School’s constructions of masculinity, in Modernism’s Masculine Subjects: Matisse, the New York School and Post-​Painterly Abstraction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 10–​12. Cécile Whiting shows how the sociology of marketing and motivational research shaped the reception of Pop art, in ‘Shopping for Pop’, in A Taste for Pop: Pop Art, Gender and Consumer Culture (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1997), 7–​49. Whiting draws on Vance Packard’s sociological trilogy dissecting advertising and mass consumption  –​The Hidden Persuaders (1957), The Status Seekers (1959) and The Waste Makers (1960) –​which also forms an important source for Joshua Shannon’s The Disappearance of Objects: New York Art and the Rise of the Postmodern City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 93 It is important to bear in mind Hal Foster’s related critique of artistic engagements with ethnography, which he argues risk reinscribing ethnographic authority rather than achieving recursive deconstruction. Hal Foster, ‘The Artist as Ethnographer’, in The Return of the Real: The Avant-​Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 1996), 172–​203 (190). However, Foster mentions sociology’s deployment by feminist artists only in passing, while Jennifer A.  González notes that Foster’s reduction of art practice to the limits of ethnography ‘becomes problematic when an explicit critique of colonial ethnographic and anthropological discourse is central to much of the artwork’ (italics in original). Jennifer A. González, Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 13. Equally, Miwon Kwon observes that many of the artists Foster mentions are often subject to institutional pressures, which his argument does not fully account for. Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-​Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 140. 94 Sheila Bob, Elizabeth Daley, James Hindman, Allan Kaprow, Peter Kirby, Larry Kirkman and Edward Wortz, ‘The Use of Art Performance as a Model for Personal and Social Awareness’, Preliminary Proposal to the National Endowment for Humanities, 18 July 1977, 1, Box 34, Folder 14, Allan Kaprow Papers. 95 Ibid., 3 and 4. 96 For the institutional consolidation of performance art in the USA during the 1970s and 1980s in relation to sociology and anthropology, see Shannon Jackson, Professing Performance:  Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), especially 146–​75. 97 See for example Mechtild Widrich, Performative Monuments: The Rematerialisation of Public Art (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2014), especially 13–​52; and Christian Berger and Jessica Santone, ‘Documentation as Art Practice in the 1960s’, Visual Resources 32, nos 3–​4 (2016):  201–​9 (202). On performance, mediation and reperformance, see Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield, eds., Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History (Bristol: Intellect, 2012).

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98 Ultimately Minujín’s work did not feature. Index of artists, n.d., Archiv Sohm, in Harald Szeemann: With By Through Because Towards Despite. Catalogue of All Exhibitions, 1957–​2005, ed. Tobia Bezzola and Roman Kurzmeyer, trans. Ben Schmidt, John S. Southard and David Stone (Zürich: Edition Voldemeer, 2007), 287. The exhibition was not the success that Szeemann had hoped for, dogged as it was by controversy relating to the Viennese Actionists, and an unenthusiastic critical response to the emphasis on documentation. See Philip Ursprung, ‘More than the Art World Can Tolerate: Otto Muehl’s Manopsychotic Ballet’, Tate Etc. (Spring 2009), www.tate.org.uk/​context-​comment/​articles/​more-​art-​world-​ can-​tolerate (accessed 18 January 2020); and Magdalena Holdar, ‘Doing Things Together: Objectives and Effects of Harald Szeemann’s Happening & Fluxus, 1970’, Journal of Curatorial Studies 6, no. 1 (2017): 91–​114 (94–​5). 99 Kaprow, ‘The Happenings are Dead –​Long Live the Happenings!’, 37. 100 Ibid., 39, 37.

Allan Kaprow’s lesson plans

Despite insisting on the Happening’s endurance in ‘The Happenings are Dead –​Long Live the Happenings!’ Kaprow was already shifting away from the commitments his 1966 article espoused by the time of its writing. The critic Jack Burnham noted this change in his influential essay ‘Systems Esthetics’ for the September 1968 issue of Artforum. Although these two articles appeared in the same publication a relatively short time apart, the pictures they painted of the Happening were very different. Kaprow, Burnham averred, had transformed the Happening from ‘a rather self-​conscious and stagy event’ to ‘a strict and elegant procedure’, which seemed ‘to arise naturally from those same considerations which have crystalized the systems approach to environmental situations’.1 Rather than the ‘psycho-​drama’ that had, in the words of the artist Lucas Samaras, dominated the Happenings of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Kaprow’s recent works constituted systematic studies of the interrelations among individuals, groups and their sociocultural contexts.2 Inspired by the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s work on organic connectivity, Burnham identified systems art with a rejection of finite objects and an embrace of social issues, including: ‘maintaining the biological liveability of the Earth, producing more accurate models of social interaction, understanding the growing symbiosis in man–​machine relationships, establishing priorities for the usage and conservation of natural resources, and defining alternate patterns of education, productivity, and leisure’.3 In his overview of general system theory, published the same year as Burnham’s article, Bertalanffy stressed that the scientific interest in holistic systems predated cybernetics. Whereas cybernetics prioritised controlled feedback, general system theory was concerned with interrelation in an expended sense, and ‘dynamic interplay of processes’.4 Kaprow’s name is not perhaps one that immediately springs to mind when thinking about ‘Systems Esthetics’ –​unlike, say, Hans Haacke or Les Levine –​but as the 1960s progressed, he used the Happening to analyse systemic interplay of the kind Bertalanffy describes, focusing in particular on interpersonal communication and its role in education and leisure.5

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The sea change Burnham detected in Kaprow’s work proved an enduring one. Almost a decade later, Pierre Restany described the artist’s methodology as a mode of research that had moved ‘closer and closer to social psychology’, seemingly ‘designed to rouse … participants into consciousness by decomposing and recomposing the fabric of life’.6 Expanding on these ideas in a 1977 Domus article, Restany argued that the small-​group activities Kaprow produced during this decade were ‘based on pure psycho-​sociology’, because of their concentration on ‘the common gestures of communication, meeting and exchange’.7 Restany concluded that a work such as Satisfaction (1976), where participants (including Restany, David Antin and Bonnie Ora Sherk) were split into couples and directed to provide reciprocal comfort through gestural rather than verbal communication, ‘transcends the happening by giving it a new dimension: that of the study and analysis of psychosomatic language’.8 Writing contemporaneously, Jonathan Crary comparably proposed that Kaprow’s activities could be understood as ‘social psychology’, owing to their investment in ‘the semiotic content of ordinary human encounters in which gesture, distance, hesitations become carriers of meaning as much or more so than spoken language’.9 Yet while for Burnham the systematic implications of Kaprow’s work were clear, Crary questioned their capacity to scale up politics on a ‘small interpersonal level’ and address wider community issues.10 Restany and Crary were writing in the late 1970s, but as Burnham’s inclusion of Kaprow in ‘Systems Esthetics’ indicates, the artist’s fascination with the politics of communication can be traced back to the 1960s and even earlier. In 1958, Kaprow presented a lecture-​performance entitled Communication in the chapel of Douglass College, New Jersey, which grew out of the experimental music classes he had taken at the New School for Social Research with John Cage.11 In it, Kaprow sought ‘to enlarge and complicate the idea of communicating by turning a speaking occasion into a multimedia activity’.12 Kaprow mutely occupied the stage while a speech he had prerecorded played. As it progressed, two other tapes of the same speech started up and multiple actions occurred. Banners unspooled from the balconies; a woman bounced a red ball up and down the aisle.13 The speech itself elaborated a critique of communication that became increasingly unintelligible as the recordings overlapped and merged: ‘ “Communication” is one of the most hateful of words. I have dedicated my best energies to retaining this disgust. I am offended by the smug and complacent techniques designed to facilitate the passage of one man’s thought to another, served up as they are in a syrup sauce of democracy and smiling optimism.’14 The action punctured commodity capitalism’s smooth deployment of the media to sell products and induce conformity, while troubling the assumption that communication is a straightforward, transparent activity, presenting it as dogged by interruptions, misunderstandings, manipulations and distractions.

Allan Kaprow’s lesson plans

Communication marked the opening salvo in Kaprow’s long-​ term commitment to rethinking physical and psychological interaction, often within educational contexts. Although this informed multiple initiatives, such as the artist’s involvement in the planned Three Country Happening, there is one that stands out. Project Other Ways, which Kaprow embarked on in the same year as Burnham’s ‘Systems Esthetics’, continued his earlier enthusiasm for sociology, particularly the writings of Erving Goffman, but developed this into an investigation of verbal and nonverbal communication through alternative pedagogy.15 Tom Finkelpearl, tracing the antecedents of socially engaged art of the 1990s and 2000s, categorises Project Other Ways as an idiosyncratic outlier –​an ‘uncharacteristic endeavour’ –​in Kaprow’s practice.16 Finkelpearl registers the venture’s importance, but misses its connections with Kaprow’s consistent investment in art education, sociology and communications theory, and with the broader redevelopment of the Happening during the late 1960s and 1970s. This chapter, by contrast, approaches Project Other Ways as one of the most nuanced and multifaceted of Kaprow’s attempts to transform the Happening into a vehicle for enabling and examining interpersonal communication. Open classrooms During autumn 1968, visitors to a disused storefront at 2556 Grove Street in Berkeley found the space transformed.17 This modest brick structure a few blocks below downtown was a hive of artistic activity, filled with children painting and drawing, ‘an open house, a constantly changing environment of junk constructions, posters and graffiti walls, and a seminar-​workshop-​office, all at once’.18 The junk constructions and graffiti walls echo the environments of tarpaper, chicken wire and aluminium foil that Kaprow and others crafted for Happenings in New York lofts and galleries at the beginning of the decade. Yet Grove Street was not a haunt of art world cognoscenti, but rather ‘the “scene” for scores of kids, teachers and school administrators’.19 The repurposed storefront, which occupied a liminal, productive zone that blurred the definitions of classroom, field outpost, gallery, studio, shop and community centre, was the operational hub for Project Other Ways, which Kaprow worked on during the academic year of 1968–​69 with the educator Herbert R. Kohl.20 The storefront, which was open ‘during the regular days of each school week’, hosted workshops, classes and training sessions attended by an estimated 250 students and educators.21 One of the many pedagogic publications produced by the initiative contains photographs that give a flavour of the vibrant alternative education environment that resulted (Figure 1.1).22 This collaboration occurred at a time of personal and professional change for Kaprow. He negotiated leave from his teaching job at the State University

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1.1 ‘Photo Play’ booklet, n.d., featuring images of graffiti walls and children creating collages, produced as part of Project Other Ways, directed by Allan Kaprow and Herbert R. Kohl, supported by the Carnegie Corporation and the Berkeley Unified School District, Berkeley, California.

of New York, Stony Brook, having already taken time out the year before for a Guggenheim grant. By spring 1968 he was corresponding with Herbert Blau, the theatre director and provost of the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles (CalArts), about joining the institution.23 In autumn 1969, Kaprow moved his family to the West Coast, but throughout Project Other Ways continued to live on Long Island. This strained the relationship with Kohl, prompting Kaprow to leave their partnership in summer 1969. Yet Kaprow later reflected that it was in Berkeley he had worked ‘with students and teachers, using the entire environment’ to create some of the ‘most interesting performances’ of his career.24 As the 1960s progressed, Kaprow chafed against the constraints of the formal university education system and his role teaching art history within it, as attested by his many grant applications for alternative pedagogic projects.25 These included a 1965 proposal to bring professional artists into public schools, to counter the chronic lack of time, resources and investment available for introducing children to avant-​garde production, which resulted in ‘virtually no

Allan Kaprow’s lesson plans

contact with real art’.26 Kaprow’s desire to place practising artists in schools –​an early version of the artist residency –​scored its biggest coup in 1968 with a substantial grant from the Carnegie Corporation.27 In searching for collaborators, he encountered Kohl. They discovered a shared belief that, ‘without a direct tie-​in between higher and lower education, curricular innovation by contemporary artists would be quite impractical’.28 Having initially supported the project, when the money materialised Stony Brook failed to manifest enthusiasm. By spring 1968 Kohl was devising ‘experimental programs’ in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and had established contacts in the local public school system.29 After another rejection from the University of California, Kohl secured a partnership with the Berkeley Unified School District, and Project Other Ways was finally born. Prior to meeting Kaprow, Kohl had received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard. As he transformed his thesis into a book, published in 1965 as The Age of Complexity, Kohl worked in New York public schools.30 Drawing on his teaching experiences in Harlem, Kohl’s second book, 36 Children (1967), offered a searing critique of US education, and recounted his attempts to reignite the appetite for learning among his students who had been quashed by a repressive system. Although the 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education made segregation in southern schools illegal, it nonetheless endured in institutions across the USA, including those in the north, many of which suffered from a severe lack of funding and resources.31 In Kohl’s school, a majority-​white staff taught a student body of predominantly African American and Latinx students, and the treatment of pupils reflected ingrained institutional racism. Kohl’s attempt to counter inadequate education and structural inequalities began with rethinking the interactions between teacher and student, albeit from his own position of privilege. Kohl championed exploratory play and improvisation, asserting that ‘there must be enough free time and activity for the teacher to discover the children’s human preferences. Observing children at play and mischief is an invaluable source of knowledge about them –​about leaders and groups, fear, courage, warmth, isolation.’32 Such sentiments converged with Kaprow’s own interests in child-​led learning and performances for children. Kaprow’s contribution to Gas (1966), executed over an August weekend in Easthampton, Long Island and New York City with Charles Frazier, Mordi Gerstein and Gordon Hyatt (funded by the Dwan Gallery and WCBS-​TV), included several children’s activities. The film of the event follows a group of children as they run through a wood and into a clearing, home to a junkyard of beaten-​up cars.33 They clamber energetically among the disintegrating chassis, crouching on bonnets and rooftops with paint cans and brushes in hand, daubing the metal with improvised designs (Figure  1.2).34 Few words are spoken; the emphasis is on nonverbal collaboration and impressionistic communication. Jeff Kelley proposes that Gas, which featured a street parade

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1.2 Allan Kaprow, Gas, August 1966, Happening performed in the Hamptons, Long Island and New York, with contributions from Charles Frazier, Mordi Gerstein and Gordon Hyatt, sponsored by Dwan Gallery and WCBS-​TV.

and inflatable sculptures unleashed by Frazier on a busy beach, tipped over too far into spectacle for Kaprow, prompting his retreat into more contained activities.35 Yet Gas also manifests a significant shift from the invocation of ‘childsplay’ as a structuring metaphor in Kaprow’s earlier performances, to the sociological investigation of children’s communication through Happenings. The scenes of children cavorting in the junkyard during Gas anticipate the notion of the ‘open classroom’ elaborated by Kohl in his 1969 book of the same name, written as a handbook for alternative pedagogy that drew on his experiences in the Berkeley Unified School District.36 The ‘open classroom’ expands beyond the school walls into the wider community physically and conceptually. It is concerned with the central precepts of ‘Interactions’, ‘Relativity’, ‘Systems and Subsystems’ and ‘Environments’ (italics in original).37 By ‘open classroom’, Kohl did not mean an entirely permissive space, but one in which authoritarianism had been relinquished in favour of creativity, chance occurrences and democratic agreement on ‘routines and rules’.38 Referring to the kind of environment created in the Grove Street storefront (see Figure 1.1), Kohl emphasised the importance of gathering visual evidence of creativity to construct a recursive learning loop: ‘the walls still have the previous year’s accumulation of writing, drawings, cartoons on them. A  section of wall is

Allan Kaprow’s lesson plans

covered with newsprint and set aside for the students’ graffiti (a possible form of writing).’39 Such thinking bears the imprint of the cybernetic ideas about networked communication that permeated sociology and psychology, which highlighted the importance of feedback between individual and environment. The ‘open classroom’ is the antithesis of the learning space critiqued by the anthropologist Jules Henry in his 1963 book Culture against Man, which warned that school was ‘an institution for drilling children in cultural orientations’.40 Like Kohl, Henry invoked cybernetics in conceiving of the classroom as a ‘communications system’, involving ‘a flow of messages between teacher (transmitter) and pupils (receivers)’, as well as a secondary system of exchange among the pupils.41 Echoing Norbert Wiener’s focus on the transmission of information, Henry worried about the ‘noise’ created by needless rules and counterproductive precepts, arguing that ‘it is this inability to avoid learning the noise with the subject matter that constitutes one of the greatest hazards for an organism so prone to polyphasic learning as man’ (italics in original).42 For Henry and others, such as the philosopher Ivan Illich, traditional schools were unable to meet contemporary society’s educational needs, wedded as they were to retrogressive disciplinary and hierarchical models.43 In a 1967 interview, Henry maintained that ‘we cannot give young people an intelligible education for leisure, how to use leisure in an intellectual and aesthetic way, because if you use your leisure for enlightenment, it leads inevitably and inexorably to a criticism of the existing structure of things’.44 Project Other Ways participated in these wider sociological and philosophical efforts to redesign traditional education systems as reflexive rather than didactic structures, and to work toward more open and critically engaged forms of pedagogic communication within and beyond the classroom. Kaprow felt that the Happening had a key role to play in these developments, believing that it could be used as a peripatetic learning device.45 In a 1968 interview, Kaprow explained that he had become fascinated by the possibility of applying the Happening ‘to the learning of a number of disciplines formerly taught in the classroom from books’.46 He saw the Happening as an interdisciplinary apparatus that could link perception, interpretation and knowledge development:  ‘what better way to learn about civics, for instance? Or sociology? Or popular imagery in our landscape?’.47 Kaprow applied these ideas directly to Project Other Ways, working on an Event Plan booklet that combines found imagery with short directions for educational exercises, subverting the rigid, predictable lesson plan (a bête-​noir of Kohl’s, who called them ‘traps for teachers’).48 The Event Plan reiterates Kaprow’s conviction that ‘any number of conventional disciplines from social dynamics, to math, to epistemology, and to local geography, even perhaps to the study of the effects of social analysis upon the society analyzed, may be derived from a seemingly pointless, yet enjoyable game’.49 Significantly, Kaprow’s rubric emphasises the necessity

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of auto-​critique –​‘the study of the effects of social analysis upon the society analyzed’ –​within the investigation of social communication, presenting the Happening as uniquely placed to foster this. Kaprow’s reformulation of the Happening expanded on his enthusiasm for pragmatist learning through doing, derived from the philosophy of John Dewey.50 The impact of Dewey’s 1934 book Art as Experience on Kaprow has been well documented, but the artist’s interest in communication can also be traced to Dewey’s educational writings.51 In ‘The School and Society’ (1899), Dewey maintained that schools had become ‘isolated from the ordinary conditions and motives of life’.52 Democracy and Education (1916) accentuated the intrinsic connections among education, society and communication: ‘society not only continues to exist by transmission, by communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication’ (italics in original).53 Dewey’s emphasis on the interdependence of communication and sociality, and treatment of alternative education as an interactive experience, re-​emerged in the radical pedagogy of the 1960s. In The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills had stressed the symbiosis between determinist models of social study and the forms of society that they analysed, arguing that sociology’s ‘bureaucratic style and its institutional embodiment are in line with the dominant trends of modern social structure and its characteristic types of thought’.54 Mills pointed to the importance of scrutinising the methodologies of social science and their effects, a precept that Kaprow’s conceptualisation of the Happening as a vehicle for conducting social study adheres to. Kaprow’s reinvention of the Happening as a learning aid for the ‘open classroom’ united the pragmatist link between progressive education and communication with the networked relationality popularised by cybernetics and general system theory. Equally, it remained acutely aware of the reciprocity between sociological analysis and the society under scrutiny, attempting to develop pedagogic forms of study that could counter predictive and disciplinary models of investigation. Photography, pedagogy, social art A Project Other Ways pamphlet vividly illustrates Kohl and Kaprow’s commitment to the open classroom. It contains images of desks aligned in forbidding military formation under the heading ‘Trapped’ (Figure 1.3). This is juxtaposed with photographs of children who have abandoned their tables in favour of the floor, where they happily engage in writing and drawing. ‘Suppose’, the accompanying text continues, ‘your classroom could move through the community’.55 Kaprow and Kohl worked with artists such as the poets Victor Hernández Cruz and David Henderson to implement this premise. Student workshops included ‘exploring the city’s graffiti with box cameras’, ‘inventing

Pamphlet produced for Project Other Ways, n.d., directed by Allan Kaprow and Herbert R. Kohl, supported by the Carnegie Corporation and the Berkeley Unified School District, Berkeley, California.

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contemporary myths out of advertisements’ and ‘constructing Environments and mounting art exhibits’.56 But it was a suite of performances entitled Six Ordinary Happenings executed with children and adults in spring 1969 that proved Kaprow’s most sustained contribution. All six –​Charity (8 March), Pose (22 March), Fine! (5 April), Shape (19 April), Giveaway (3 May) and Purpose (24 May) –​took place in streets and public spaces. Together, they constituted an in-​depth exploration of the educational, sociological and political possibilities of the Happening as a communications device (Figure 1.4).57 Each was conceived as an opportunity for learning in the lived environment, from Pose, with its instruction that participants photograph each other at sites including railroad tracks and a pier, to Charity, in which children bought piles of second-​hand clothing that they washed and cleaned in laundromats, parcelled up with ribbons, and returned to the stores. After this latter action, Kaprow recalled, he and the students ‘talked a long time about what is a gift, does it have any strings attached?’58 These conversations were triggered by some thrift shops’ rejection of the packages, a reaction Kaprow attributed to the tense political atmosphere in Berkeley at the time. The ensuing ‘heart-​ break’, Kaprow believed, provided an important life lesson about ‘giving and taking’.59 While the precise nature of the lesson varied from Happening to Happening, the use of photography as a pedagogic device linked several performances, notably Pose, Fine!, Shape and Giveaway. Photography has long held a precarious, vexed place within critical assessments of Kaprow’s work, and accounts of performance art more generally. In ‘The Happenings are Dead  –​Long Live the Happenings!’ Kaprow cast photographs as belated and partial, inert residues of a lost flesh-​and-​blood entity, like nail clippings or stray hairs.60 Kelley characterises Kaprow’s professed attitude toward photography as one of ‘indifference’, observing that ‘he was not opposed to the documentation of an event as long as the act of documenting it didn’t interfere with the work itself ’.61 Kaprow was evidently anxious about the impact photography might have on his audiences, and Rodenbeck attests that Kaprow began to limit his events to invited participants because of its potentially inhibitive effects.62 This ambivalence seems at first glance to correspond with theorisations of performance art as inimical to documentation, which argue its essence lies in the live act and position photography as reductive and commodifying.63 Following Kelley and Rodenbeck, Alex Potts maintains that although some of the photographs that emerged from Kaprow’s Happenings were undeniably ‘fascinating and curiously resonant’, they ultimately ‘function more like fragmentary clues than a fully realised visualising’, and should not be confused with ‘self-​sufficient conceptual works of art’.64 This is an important distinction, but Kaprow’s approach to the relationship between his Happenings and their documentation did have correlations with conceptualism.65 Lawrence Alloway

Allan Kaprow’s lesson plans

Allan Kaprow, poster with scores for Six Ordinary Happenings, 1969, sponsored by Project Other Ways, Berkeley, California. Photographs by Carol Bowen.

wryly observed that the photographs from Kaprow’s Happenings might actually ‘convey more to a reader than some participants could be expected to derive from a performance’, concluding that ‘documentary reproduction can be the only route of access for some art’ and that ‘uses of reproduction as a constituent of art make creative play out of everybody’s familiarity with mass communications’.66 Kaprow increasingly understood photography as an

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information-​bearing medium that situated his Happenings within a network of media communications, endowing performances with the capacity to contribute to systems of interpersonal exchange.67 This is indicated by the score for Giveaway, the penultimate Happening in the series, as it appears on the Six Ordinary Happenings poster (Figure 1.4): Stacks of dishes Left on street corners Photographed Next day, photographed.

Giveaway’s participants went out into the streets and positioned sets of crockery in elaborate configurations. Photographs show carefully arranged still-​life tableaux on sun-​baked pavements, spilling across parking lots, lining the sides of roads and secreted inside a telephone booth (Figure  1.5). The constellations of cups, plates, bowls and cutlery create an irrepressibly convivial air, anticipating sociability. When Kaprow and his participants returned the next day to observe the fate of their offerings, they found that ‘some were entirely gone, some were left untouched, [and] one group had been used and then left with the remnants of food’.68 Giveaway should not, however, be understood as proto-​relational aesthetics.69 There may be affinities between Kaprow’s distribution of plates and cutlery and the Free Food Store that the Diggers established across the bay in San Francisco between 1966 and 1967, but his work’s sociological focus on the study of interaction sets it apart from the straightforward promotion of sociability.70 The Bay Area art critic Thomas Albright reported that Kaprow had come to see photography as ‘an integral part of his events’.71 Kaprow explained to Albright: ‘photography puts a frame around things and you see them differently. In getting out with a camera, you see parts of the city you never saw before. And you meet and talk with people as never before.’72 Elsewhere, Albright cited Kaprow’s reflections on the pedagogic possibilities of photography specifically with regard to Giveaway. The artist linked the gesture of leaving dishes in ‘different neighbourhoods’ to the act of taking photographs, stating that the Happening’s combination of these processes enabled participants to ‘learn things about the city, about people, that you learn in no other way’.73 These comments reflect Kaprow’s growing sense that his work was ‘concerned with what happens to people and myself … I might be called a social artist.’74 Photography not only offered insight into communications between individuals and groups, but also held out a way of reformulating existing relations. Kaprow’s approach to photography corresponds with the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s 1965 study of the medium, which emphasises the extent to which, in everyday usage, it is tied to ‘the fulfilment of social and socially defined functions’ as opposed to aesthetics.75 In Six Ordinary Happenings

Allan Kaprow, Giveaway, May 1969, part of Six Ordinary Happenings, sponsored by Project Other Ways, Berkeley, California.

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Kaprow plays on photography’s imbrication with ‘socially defined functions’, particularly those relating to the documentation of sociability, but he also seeks to use it to reroute rather than reiterate everyday social behaviour. While many of the photographs taken during Giveaway document the placement of the dishes, several feature the students and teachers themselves. In one, a teenaged girl sits with her legs crossed on a bench in the street, next to a small teapot balanced on a saucer, and a cup. In her hand, she holds another cup, half-​raised. A second girl bends down as if to inspect it, or to take a cheeky sip (Figure 1.6). Their performance for the camera is a resolutely self-​aware one, indicated by the appraising gaze with which the student on the bench meets the camera lens. The two present an anticipated scenario of the Happening using the props provided, and in so doing, reveal and make strange the accepted behaviours and protocols governing social interaction. The photograph does not just document the Happening, but enacts the negotiation of nonverbal action and gesture expected  –​even demanded  –​in effective social interchange. By isolating the ritualised gestures of tea drinking, the photograph, moreover, creates room for questioning and critique, pushing Giveaway beyond the study of communication into active consideration of how it might be reconstituted. This consideration was alive to how constructs of racial difference impacted on access to, and the experience of, education and communication. Grove Street, on which the Project Other Ways storefront was located, had long acted as a marker of racialised social division in Berkeley, forming an unofficial border between white and black areas of the city.76 The section that continued down through neighbouring Oakland was a significant, vibrant focal point for African American culture.77 Racial politics were acutely apparent in the Berkeley and Oakland public schools that Kaprow and Kohl worked with. Many of the children, as in the Giveaway photograph, were students of colour, and the attitude of the schoolteachers and administrators sometimes replicated the structural racism Kohl had encountered in Harlem.78 During and after the Second World War, Oakland in particular experienced a boom period that attracted a significant number of migrants, including many African Americans seeking to escape racism and dire economic conditions in the south. However, during the 1960s it suffered a decline, and the black community became an increasing focus of inequality and repressive policing.79 These conditions, which included substandard schooling, fuelled the emergence of the Black Power movement and the founding of the Black Panther Party in Oakland by Huey P.  Newton and Bobby Seale in October 1966.80 Berkeley, meanwhile, only voted to tackle de facto segregation in junior high schools in 1964, and introduced desegregation in elementary schools in 1966.81 In this context, the use of photography in works such as Giveaway might be seen as a way of empowering structurally disadvantaged students to challenge

Allan Kaprow, Giveaway, May 1969, part of Six Ordinary Happenings, sponsored by Project Other Ways, Berkeley, California.

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their repressive education, lay claim to public space, and analyse exclusionary patterns of communication and exchange. The Giveaway photograph also raises the spectres of artistic exploitation and unequal power relations. The young, female African American student seated on the bench performs her ‘alternative education’ as part of a Happening designed by a white, male, middle-​class artist with a university degree, who has parachuted into an area where he does not live.82 In her analysis of photography and social relations, Ariella Azoulay contends that the act of taking a photograph is ‘liable to exploit the photographed individual, aggravate his or her injury, publicly expose it, and rob the individual of intimacy’.83 The Giveaway image risks these dangers, and flags the extent to which ostensibly progressive interventions, when isolated from wider reform, might replicate inequality rather than effectively challenge it. Yet the piercing quality of the central subject’s gaze, and her tangible assertion of agency, makes this image a charged repository of social negotiation and critique, which highlights the inequalities of the educational system and the art world alike.84 The photographs produced through Giveaway are sociological and conceptual in that they are treated as information-​bearing, while their relationship with their sociocultural context is an important factor in the Happening and its participants’ attempts to analyse that context, and potentially alter it. Teaching nonverbal communication A performance from the year before Six Ordinary Happenings entitled Travelog helps illuminate Kaprow’s activation and investigation of photography’s social matrix. In summer 1968, around thirty-​five people, mainly students from Fairleigh Dickinson University’s New Jersey campus, gathered for a piece that started out as a ‘ritual’ and ‘game’, but morphed into a social study.85 On the first day, participants divided up into groups, got into their cars, and drove to one of the local garages in and around the town of Madison, armed with Polaroid cameras, Bolex 16mm film equipment and tape recorders. After drawing up at each forecourt, they asked the mechanics to change a tyre on their cars, documenting the ensuing process (Figure 1.7). They then moved on to another gas station and repeated the exercise. At the end of the day, everyone shared their instant photographs and recordings at a feedback session.86 The results constituted ‘field work in sociology and psychology’ just as much as a performance, with the participants transformed into participant-​observers.87 Travelog generated a materialist analysis of changing work patterns and attitudes to the emergent service economy, uncovering ‘a whole sociology of filling stations’.88 Kaprow and his students discovered two types of gas station on their New Jersey peregrinations. An older model, their wooden facades bedecked in a plethora of signs, offered car repairs alongside gas, and attracted

Allan Kaprow’s lesson plans

Allan Kaprow, Travelog, July 1968, Happening presented for the Eighth International Artists’ Seminar, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, New Jersey.

groups of ‘hangers-​on, truckers and others similarly belonging to the automotive life’ (Figure 1.8).89 Newer, sleeker structures covered in aluminium and plastic were, by contrast, solely concerned with the provision of one particular fuel brand. While the former nurtured an organic ‘social center on a small scale’, the corporate garages fostered ‘next to no social life’, offering nothing more than ‘decorated shells, large facades for advertising the gas’.90 The owners of the older garages were anxious that the latest style of gas station would wipe out their businesses, and their employees seemed dissatisfied with their jobs. Conversely, many attendants in the newer stations were students picking up extra money, who felt little attachment to the work. These tensions surfaced during the Happening. Because Madison was a relatively small town, some garages inevitably received more than one visit, and attendants became curious about what was going on. Some of their enquiries were tinged with fear: they were worried that the gasoline companies were investigating them.91 Travelog scrutinised gas stations at a moment when their physical forms –​and by extension their social and psychic identities –​ were undergoing significant change, itemising the modes that alienated labour might assume in a sample US town.92

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1.8 Allan Kaprow, Travelog, July 1968, Happening presented for the Eighth International Artists’ Seminar, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, New Jersey.

Photographs in Travelog facilitated the collation of information about gasoline stations, but they also provided a means of catalysing social relations, a faculty enhanced by Kaprow’s use of Polaroid cameras, with their capacity to produce images of interpersonal encounters almost instantaneously.93 On the second day of the Happening, Kaprow and his participants reperformed the activity, but without cameras or audio equipment. This rendered what had been a highly social, interactive experience a slightly tedious chore. The machines, Kaprow concluded, ‘had been costumes to insure permission to do something unnecessary. They were guarantees of interest and response about the ordinary.’94 While Travelog was shaped by the power imbalance between observers and observed played out along class divisions, the photographs were not simply invasive but helped visualise interaction and make it legible. In the first day’s feedback session, the photographs prompted discussion and fresh understandings of the social situation. Photography, it transpired, was not the enemy of this Happening, but its lifeblood. Kaprow rejected aesthetic photography, which he equated with clarity and the attendant danger that secondary audiences might treat it as a guide for reconstruction.95 He was therefore ‘delighted’ when performances such as

Allan Kaprow’s lesson plans

Travelog produced ‘bad photographs –​that is, snapshot type rather than professional ones’.96 Kaprow valued these images not simply because they would frustrate reperformance, but also because they harboured sociological traces of their subjects and makers. This chimes with Bourdieu’s contention that ‘the aesthetic of the great mass of photographic works may be legitimately reduced, without being reductive, to the sociology of the groups that produce them, the functions which they assign to them and the meanings which they confer upon them, both explicitly and, more particularly, implicitly’.97 Yet Travelog did not document families  –​the mainstay of nonprofessional photography in Bourdieu’s analysis –​but instead reflected the adoption of a ‘touristic attitude’ to the everyday, in which ‘everything becomes a source of astonishment’.98 Travelog’s photographs are thus closely tied to existing social uses of the medium, but retain the potential to undercut and reroute them. The images also share a strong resemblance to Ed Ruscha’s photo book Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963). Ruscha took his photographs according to a preordained, self-​imposed mandate to produce images of gas stations on the route between his house in Los Angeles and his parents’ home in Oklahoma City. Twentysix Gasoline Stations inevitably accumulates sociological information. Like Travelog, it captures the personalised idiosyncrasy of ‘Bob’s Service’ in Los Angeles, together with the corporate conformism of Mobil and Standard gas stations in Arizona (Figure 1.9). Echoing Kaprow’s rejection of aestheticising photography, in a 1965 interview with John Coplans, Ruscha stressed that Twentysix Gasoline Stations was a collection of ‘technical data like industrial photography’.99 During this interchange, Coplans asked Ruscha if he had read Nonverbal Communication: Notes on the Visual Perception of Human Relations (1956) by the psychiatrist Jurgen Ruesch, connecting the kind of photographic data Ruscha gathered with the study of nonverbal exchange.100 Conceived when working at the Langley Porter Clinic in Berkeley, and realised with assistance from the poet, critic and writer Weldon Kees, Nonverbal Communication extended Ruesch’s collaboration with Gregory Bateson on Communication:  The Social Matrix of Psychiatry (1951). It was comparably motivated by Ruesch’s belief that one of the ‘outstanding characteristics of our time is a deep and pervasive concern with communication’ (emphasis in original).101 Communication studies, he argued, had overlooked nonverbal interaction in favour of the written and the verbal. By contrast, Nonverbal Communication assessed the role of gesture in human interaction through photographic spreads, combining images taken by Ruesch with street photography and found material. As well as resonating with Ruscha’s work, there are also compelling correspondences between the layouts designed by Ruesch and Kees –​‘gestures as substitutes for words’, ‘nonverbal accompaniments of verbal communication’ (Figure 1.10) –​and the photographs of people, situations and environments in

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1.9 Ed Ruscha, Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1963 (detail), artist’s book, 7 1/​16 in × 5 1/​2 in × 3/​16 in (17.9 cm × 14 cm × 0.5 cm).

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Allan Kaprow’s lesson plans

Kaprow’s Happenings. When discussing Project Other Ways, Kaprow reflected that while ‘our whole culture is verbal’, ‘experience is far more communicative without being verbal’, and his inclusion of photography in Giveaway, Charity, Fine!, Pose and Shape was, as in Travelog, bound up with the exploration of nonverbal communication.102 Yet while, for example, in the photographs from Giveaway the arrangements of plates and bowls clearly reference established social patterns, some images push everyday lexicons to the limits of legibility. What is a viewer to make of multiple plates crowded along a pavement, interspersed here and there with jugs, cups and glasses, or the cornucopia of crockery stuffed into the phone booth? Although Ruscha agreed with Coplans that Nonverbal Communication was a ‘good book’, he reflected that ‘it has something to say on a rational level that my books evade … it is for people who want to know about the psychology of pictures or images’.103 He claimed that photo books such as Twentysix Gasoline Stations and Various Small Fires (1964) went one step further: ‘this … IS the psychology of images’.104 Margaret Iversen argues that Ruscha’s photography is performative, in that the photographs are ‘the outcome of a rule-​ governed performance’.105 As a result, ‘the photographic act is crucially altered by its re-​functioning as part of a performative exercise’, whereby a different state is brought into being.106 The Giveaway photographs have a comparably performative quality, in that they question traditional behavioural expectations and present new scenarios for improvised communication. The correspondences between Kaprow’s use of photography and its role in sociological and psychological studies of interpersonal exchange link Travelog and Giveaway to wider preoccupations with nonverbal interaction, exemplified by the anthropologist Ray L.  Birdwhistell’s development of kinesics. Conceived as the science of body-​motion communication, kinesics proposed that bodily gestures and facial expressions were just as important for enabling interaction –​and in creating antagonisms and divisions –​as speech and writing.107 Birdwhistell emphasised the significance of childhood as a formative crucible in which the individual had to learn a complex series of cues for interaction to achieve effective socialisation: ‘in every society, before attaining membership in that society, the child must gain control of the pattern of, and be incorporated into, the communication system of the society’.108 For Birdwhistell, the development of mental health conditions such as schizophrenia could be linked to blockages in gestural and physical feedback between children and their parents.109 Project Other Ways paralleled this wider sociological and psychological investment in nonverbal communication, particularly among children, for facilitating –​and policing –​interpersonal relations.

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Art and the system These aspirations had political resonances, as the charged relations between Six Ordinary Happenings and the social environment of Berkeley reveals. Talking to Moira Roth in 1978, Kaprow described how ‘when I came to California in the late 1960s, I  had very socio-​political ideas in mind for my work’.110 This contrasts the more familiar picture of Kaprow as a cautious, sceptical figure who, somewhat counterintuitively, given his emphasis on the interrelatedness of art and life, doubted art’s capacity for activist engagement. Kaprow voiced

Allan Kaprow’s lesson plans

Jurgen Ruesch and Weldon Kees, ‘Gestures as Substitutes for Words’ and ‘Nonverbal Accompaniments of Verbal Communication’, in Nonverbal Communication: Notes on the Visual Perception of Human Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 77, 78.

his mistrust with statements such as ‘a picture never changed the price of eggs’, and despite being approached on various occasions to create Happenings in aid of New Left political causes, refused on the grounds that ‘it wouldn’t do any good’.111 Yet Project Other Ways perceptibly addressed the challenge, articulated by Crary at the beginning of this chapter, of scaling up the insights gleaned through the study of intimate interpersonal communication to address the

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wider social sphere. For Kaprow, art’s relationship to politics was fraught and liable to tokenism, but the links between his performances and their sociocultural environments were more nuanced than many of his own statements, taken at face value, might seemingly allow. Other works that Kaprow developed as he refined the Happening’s structure and operation demonstrate this. Flick was performed in conjunction with Angry Arts Week in New York, which ran from 29 January to 5 February 1967 and united artists working across a diversity of media in condemnation of the Vietnam War.112 Flick occurred at the end of a poetry reading by Clayton Eshleman. Attendees were invited to pick up a box of matches and a whistle, before dispersing into the Manhattan streets. As they went, they lit the matches and blew on the whistles, the flames and the noise ‘dying out and disappearing in a few minutes’.113 Kaprow instructed participants that if they attracted any unwanted attention from ‘any authority’, they should pretend that they were participating in a children’s film.114 This could be interpreted as an act of bad faith regarding art’s capacity for social engagement, yet Flick’s anticipation of state violence as a possible response implicitly acknowledged the difficulty of drawing clear dividing lines between art and political action. While each brief match-​scratch and burst of sputtering light might have seemed poetic, the flames also referenced the deployment of napalm by the US military.115 When combined with the flares of light, the act of blowing on a whistle assumed overtones of a cry for help, creating an equivalence  –​or at the very least a metaphorical link –​between the bodies of the participants and those directly affected by the conflict in Vietnam.116 This is not to deny Kaprow’s deeply equivocal view of the Happening’s political potential. Although the artist stressed the affinities between Happenings, ‘civil rights demonstrations, [and] national election campaigns’, he was perturbed by the implications of these correspondences.117 This is evident in Interruption, a performance Kaprow designed later in 1967 at Stony Brook, which Kelley describes as a parody of ‘the theater of social protest’.118 Notwithstanding this parodic element, the work has ramifications for the relationship of communication, pedagogy and politics in Project Other Ways. Sponsored by Stony Brook’s Student Activities Board and Creative Arts Society, Interruption revolved around imitating a protest, during which participants were directed to march ‘slowly, endlessly, silently carrying absolutely blank signs and placards’. This was combined with ‘masses of sit-​ins everywhere, on paths, in dorms, classrooms, cafeterias’.119 But if Kaprow intended to reveal the hollowness of political posturing, the reaction of the Stony Brook community transformed it into a genuinely contentious flashpoint. Unnerved by Kaprow’s plans to perform political protest on campus, faculty members signed a joint letter refuting the Happening.120 On the first day, university officials stepped in and curtailed the action.121 Staff members

Allan Kaprow’s lesson plans

were not the only ones who were unhappy. Students also objected, sabotaging a section that involved hanging up clothes in a cafeteria by cutting the washing lines. It is unclear whether they were also irritated by the imposition of the ‘interruption’, or by Kaprow’s critique of direct action. The latter seems indicated by one newspaper that reported that many students ‘disliked what they thought it represented’.122 The few who did participate manipulated the score to their own ends. Photographs in the press show students deliriously hurling fistfuls of paper around in corridors, prompting university officials to condemn the Happening as a fire hazard; Newsday conveyed the combustible atmosphere by irreverently placing its coverage next to another story about a fire at a lumberyard (Figure  1.11). Although Interruption undeniably failed on several levels, it illuminated how the Happening had become intimately intertwined with debates about learning, dissensus and political expression. If the relationship between pedagogy and politics took Kaprow unawares in Interruption, by Project Other Ways he was actively testing it out. Six Ordinary Happenings sent students and educators into the Berkeley streets during a period of unrest. Fuelled by the legacies of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the global student protests of 1968, a dispute between the University of California and local activists over an area of land, which the latter wanted to preserve as the ‘People’s Park’ and the former to develop, turned violent.123 The conflict peaked on 15 May, with the fatal shooting of the student James Rector, and injuries to over 100 people. Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California, called in the National Guard and declared a state of emergency, and an atmosphere of ‘fear and uncertainty’ set in.124 Although Project Other Ways rarely addressed the violence directly, the activities ‘reflected its paranoias and powerful energies, as well as the surge of utopian fervor … No one could ignore the tension and the smell of tear gas, and our experiments sometimes approached the edges of social boundaries.’125 The performances in Six Ordinary Happenings that veered closest to the edges of these ‘social boundaries’, manifesting a countercultural sensibility through their questioning and remaking of communication, were created during April before hostilities fully escalated. Like Flick, Fine! tested state surveillance, but differed in that the performance expressly courted attention. Participants parked cars in restricted zones without purchasing a ticket, and waited for the traffic police to notice. They then photographed the fines being given (Figure 1.12). The Happening concluded with ‘sending pix, reports, fines to cops’.126 Although playful, Fine! explored a regulatory social mechanism and the coercive interaction involved in its maintenance. It placed participants in potential positions of confrontation with authority, treating the camera as a technology that could both trigger that confrontation, and also enable resistance to and mockery of control.127

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1.11 Joy Aschenbach and Robert Mayer, ‘As an Art Form, It Happened to Be a Fire Hazard’, Newsday (12 May 1967).

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Allan Kaprow, Fine!, April 1969, part of Six Ordinary Happenings, sponsored by Project Other Ways, Berkeley, California.

Where Fine! overtly tested constructs of behavioural permissibility, Shape figured contemporary tensions less explicitly, but arguably just as powerfully. Project Other Ways attendees transitorily spray-​painted the outlines of their bodies onto the urban fabric, before taking evidentiary photographs of their silhouettes and sending them to local newspapers. Shape also produced eerie images of participants swathed in protective plastic sheeting as they made their designs. These accrue connotations of body bags and shrouds, channelling the increasingly ‘off kilter’ and ‘poisoned’ atmosphere (Figure 1.13).128 One grainy photograph shows young participants imprinting each other’s contours onto the pavement as a Berkeley police car passes by, capturing the contemporaneous scrutiny of bodily interaction (Figure 1.14). A tongue-​in-​cheek description of

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1.13 Allan Kaprow, Shape, April 1969, part of Six Ordinary Happenings, sponsored by Project Other Ways, Berkeley, California. Photograph by Gretchen Garlinghouse.

the performance asserted that, during its execution, ‘only two minor examples of police harassment and brutality were observed by this reporter, though many others may have taken place’.129 The bodily outlines and photographs produced during Shape nonverbally telegraph danger and resistance, but also a hope that public space might be reclaimed by individuals working together, enduring beyond the action as testimonials to this performative possibility.130 Six Ordinary Happenings did not deploy performance for direct action or protest, but the works nonetheless intervened in shared space, and forms of .

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Allan Kaprow, Shape, April 1969, part of Six Ordinary Happenings, sponsored by Project Other Ways, Berkeley, California.

communicative interaction within that space.131 This corresponds with Meiling Cheng’s reading of Kaprow’s increasingly educative approach from the 1970s after his move to the West Coast as involving ‘a redressive procedure that may alter or deconstruct the stagnancy of a normative condition’.132 Kaprow’s understanding of the Happening as transformative was closely linked to his reconceptualisation of it as a pedagogic aid, and to his questioning of resistance by student demonstrators, which he worried was ‘too simplistic’.133 He later recalled his conviction at the time that ‘the real way to deal with the world –​ I  was naïve then, probably  –​was through positive education, rather than revolt’.134 For all their limitations, the Six Ordinary Happenings scenarios posit education as politically performative, able to transform existing conditions and facilitate alternative routes of interpersonal communication.135 Kaprow and Kohl’s combination of alternative pedagogies, social studies and communications experiments participates in the wider questioning of existing models of social analysis and the conclusions they were being used to support during and after the global ructions of 1968.136 In The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (1970), Alvin W. Gouldner underscored the ‘sheer visibility of sociologists in the student revolts’, citing this as evidence of the discipline’s radical critique from within.137 Reflecting on American sociology in

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the 1960s, Doug McAdam describes how the unrest of this period challenged the models of normative order promoted by structural functionalists and collective behaviourists.138 As Bertalanffy had noted in General System Theory, the popularisation of the systems approach and the impact of cybernetics on sociology and psychology fuelled critiques of functionalism, which had dominated American sociology during the 1950s. Encapsulated by the work of Talcott Parsons, this model faced growing condemnation as overwhelmingly conservative, because of its overemphasis on what Bertalanffy identified as ‘maintenance, equilibrium, adjustment, homeostasis, [and] stable institutional structures’.139 As a result, functionalism downplayed personal agency, failing to account adequately for sociocultural change and the capacity among individuals and groups to agitate for revolution. By contrast, systems theory emphasised interrelation and responsiveness between the component parts of social entities. Similarly, the focus on interrelation by Goffman and others created a space for the consideration of subjective agency within overarching structures.140 These concerns also informed the transmission of documentation from Kaprow’s Berkeley performances in the aftermath of Project Other Ways, as evidenced by the inclusion of photographs from Shape and Pose in the 1971 exhibition Arte de sistemas (Systems Art). The images were arranged on pages Kaprow had designed for a calendar project with the Junior Council of the Museum of Modern Art produced in 1970 (Figure 1.15).141 This monster show was organised by the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC) in Buenos Aires. Over 100 artists from North America, Latin America and Europe filled the Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art (Museo de Arte Moderno). Jorge Glusberg, its organiser and the director of the CAYC, echoed the precepts of Burnham’s ‘Systems Eesthetics’ in his catalogue essay: ‘art as idea, political art, ecological art, the art of proposals or cybernetic art which we have decided to call –​by its common denominator –​art systems’.142 Many submissions were proposals rather than finished products, partly as documentation was easy and cheap to transport through the mail. Their uniform presentation on boards expanded on the aims of the Three Country Happening, flattening out the differences among practitioners working across a range of geographies. The show underscores the extent to which the concerns that Kaprow explored through the Happening in Project Other Ways resonated with wider investigations of communication systems.143 In the catalogue for Art Systems in Latin America, an offshoot from Systems Art that travelled to the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London during 1974, Glusberg argued that, ‘from the point of view of semiology, art is an ideological discourse, that is to say, a semiological system, since discourse means system of signs. By means of the fact and by taking into account the above definition, man can become aware of his social reality.’144 Ironically, the very qualities which Glusberg attributed to systems art –​its ability to analyse the structures that it was part

Allan Kaprow’s lesson plans

Allan Kaprow, Days Off: A Calendar of Happenings (1970) on display at the Arte de sistemas exhibition, 1971, Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires, organised by the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC), Buenos Aires.

of –​increasingly sat at odds with the domination of CAYC’s internationalist model in Argentina as the 1970s progressed, as I explore further in Chapter 4. In 1971, however, Kaprow’s experimentation with the Happening and its documentation as a form of social art that could rethink communication through alternative education joined transnational attempts to navigate and critique ossified social systems. The legacy of Project Other Ways Finkelpearl’s verdict that Project Other Ways was an anomaly within Kaprow’s practice has some grounds. By summer 1969, the Carnegie money was running out, and Kohl and Kaprow’s relationship had descended into acrimony.145 After Six Ordinary Happenings, Kaprow’s involvement effectively ceased, despite enthusiasm among students, teachers and parents.146 Yet Kaprow’s subsequent work was fundamentally shaped by the experience, while other artists embarked on comparable investigations. In 1970, Robert Whitman, who had studied with Kaprow at Rutgers University and created Happenings in the early 1960s, led a project called Children and Communication for Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.).147 This was part of E.A.T.’s transdisciplinary programme Projects Outside Art, which addressed topics including ‘education,

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health, housing, environmental control, transportation, communication, food production and distribution, leisure activities and entertainment’.148 Whitman created environments at the E.A.T.  loft at 9 East 16th Street, and Automation House at 49 East 68th Street, in New  York City, kitted out with telephones and electrowriters, as well as telex, Xerox and Magnavox facsimile machines. Groups of children were invited to inhabit them simultaneously and use the technology to send each other text and picture messages (Figure 1.16). Although the youngest children struggled a little with text, and the older ones were somewhat inhibited, those aged between eight and ten communicated eagerly.149 The tented installations that Whitman created for the children –​adults and teachers were discouraged from entering –​echoed his performances such as American Moon (1962), during which the audience was similarly ensconced. This vividly underscores how, by the end of the decade, the characteristics of the early Happenings had been rerouted into communications experiments. As Michelle Kuo notes, unlike Project Other Ways Children and Communication did not have an explicitly pedagogic aim.150 But it did nonetheless exhibit social aspirations. As well as familiarising children with new technologies that would shape their futures, it promised them the opportunity ‘to communicate with children who they probably would never know otherwise’.151 However, an E.A.T. progress report recorded how when a group of predominantly black students from Northside, tellingly styled as ‘a specialized school for children with learning and discipline problems’, was installed at Automation House and invited to communicate with white private school students at the E.A.T. loft, ‘their inputs were largely unanswered. The richer children tended to feel they could not understand the black children and their language. There was no active communication. The white kids were receiving and the black kids were giving information about being black but the white kids couldn’t communicate to the black about their experiences.’152 The technologies could not overcome the ingrained social divisions already operative between participants, and which the project set-​up failed to anticipate and challenge in its design. Although Julie Martin, a central figure in E.A.T., points to the project’s utopianism and its anticipation of Internet connectivity, Children and Communication intimated that media technologies could only go so far without deeper social change.153 Kuo persuasively proposes that Children and Communication conducted a study of individuation that exposed the limits of sociological models focused on ‘distinctions between individual and system, subject and object, agency and structure, self and Lebenswelt’, instead offering a vision of networked subjectivity.154 But it also illuminated how users shape a given network. While E.A.T. claimed that ‘each time a machine is used with another child that operation takes on its own personality and

Experiments in Art and Technology, Children and Communication, 1971, environments designed by Robert Whitman at the E.A.T. loft, 9 East 16th Street, New York City and Automation House, 49 East 68th Street, New York City, featuring telephones and electrowriters, as well as telex, Xerox and Magnavox facsimile machines. Photograph by Shunk-​Kender.

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potential’, it was equally the case that these operations replicated social factors, including entrenched racism, classism and white supremacy.155 Children and Communication and Kaprow’s Berkeley Happenings were alike haunted by this circumscribing recursivity. Kaprow had flirted with the possibilities of technologically networked communication in Hello (1968), a recording of which was partially aired on WGBH-​TV Boston’s programme The Medium Is the Medium in 1969.156 This work connected four sites  –​including one at MIT and one at a children’s school –​by camera with the television studio, so that people could communicate instantaneously.157 The result was what Gene Youngblood described in his 1970 book Expanded Cinema as ‘a sort of sociological conduit’.158 The channels could, however, be switched, altered and disrupted from the WGBH-​ TV control room, leading Erika Balsom to observe that Hello, in contrast to Children and Communication, acknowledges how ‘the exercise of power does not cease to exist over distributed networks, it simply functions differently’.159 Perhaps wary of the extent to which technology might provide the illusion of equally distributed agency rather than its actuality, from the 1970s Kaprow’s performances focused on in-​person interaction and analysis.160 These were frequently by invitation only, and featured extensive collective debriefing sessions based on feminist consciousness-​raising.161 Comfort Zones of 1975, produced with Galería Vandrés in Madrid, is typical. The score, published in an accompanying activity booklet (the work was also videoed), is written for two people, A and B, who attempt to intuit the needs of one another without verbal communication: A and B, sitting silently in a room B, periodically turning off the light and later turning on the light A, trying to anticipate these decisions saying “now” when the thought comes strongest162

Comfort Zones focuses on the tensions underlying intimate exchanges, reflecting the endurance of Goffman’s influence on Kaprow, particularly his premise that ‘the ultimate behavioral materials are the glances, gestures, positionings, and verbal statements that people continuously feed into the situation, whether intended or not’.163 In the activity booklet, Kaprow directly draws on such thinking, explaining how Comfort Zones plays with ‘what the social sciences call “territorial bubbles” and “eye contacts” ’.164 Each cool, contained performance constitutes a small psychosocial experiment, which can trace its roots in the pedagogic exercises of Project Other Ways.165 Kaprow believed in the wider applicability of these performances. Alongside the proposal for ‘The Use of Art Performance as a Model for Personal and Social Development’ discussed in this book’s introduction, an unrealised

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pitch for Documenta 6 (also 1977)  would have assembled researchers from across the arts and social sciences ‘to engage in a seminar-​workshop for the purposes of creating a collaborative “work” ’.166 That the precise nature of this work remained vague perhaps indicates why it stalled, but it testifies to how Kaprow saw his practice merging with pedagogy and social psychology.167 ‘If this Happening or Activity leads to greater understanding of personal and social dynamics’, he speculated, ‘can it also be part of social science?’168 Kaprow’s proposals and activities of the mid-​to-​late 1970s articulate a claim for the performances that developed from the early Happenings, based on their capacity to raise self-​reflexive awareness about the dynamics of everyday interaction. This returns us to Crary’s question about the ability of such work to signify beyond the immediate interpersonal level. Kaprow did not reflect on Project Other Ways until nearly thirty years later, in Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (1995), edited by Suzanne Lacy, who studied with Kaprow at CalArts. Mapping the Terrain evolved from Lacy’s involvement with the 1993 exhibition Culture in Action:  New Public Art in Chicago, curated by Mary Jane Jacob for Sculpture Chicago. Culture in Action attempted to reimagine public art as community-​based rather than static, investing it with a commitment to social responsibility.169 Lacy proposed that the practitioners gathered in Mapping the Terrain –​including Suzi Gablik, Judith F. Baca and Arlene Raven –​shared a way of working ‘that resembles political and social activity but is distinguished by its aesthetic sensibility’.170 During the 1990s and 2000s, art that used social relations as its material became increasingly prominent, and the vocabulary used to describe it proliferated, adding ‘socially engaged art’ and ‘social art practice’ to Lacy’s formulation of New Genre Public Art.171 Despite Kaprow’s scepticism about art’s capacity to intervene in sociopolitical issues, Project Other Ways was assimilated into a narrative that foregrounded art’s capacity to effect social change.172 Kaprow’s essay raises issues that have become central to debates about socially engaged practice, questioning the extent to which initiatives such as Project Other Ways can be conceived of as art. He worries that, by appearing in Mapping the Terrain, his memories could cause his work with Kohl to be pigeonholed retrospectively as art alone.173 Simultaneously, Kaprow admits the project’s limited social impact, writing that ‘rephrasing the question … to “What happened to the kids after they left us?” probably must be answered:  “They returned to the way they were.” ’174 Ultimately, for Kaprow, open-​endedness constitutes the project’s most important attribute, because it is a ‘democratic’ quality that ‘challenges the mind’.175 Whereas scholars of socially engaged art such as Claire Bishop and Grant Kester are united –​albeit from different perspectives –​by an investment in the enduring aesthetic qualities of socially engaged work, Kaprow is more interested in interdisciplinary ambiguity.176 He asserts that Project Other Ways was ‘intent on merging the

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arts with things not considered art, namely training in reading, writing, math, and so on’, and that while this was indebted to the ‘innovative art movements of the day’, which ‘provided the models of our objectives’, the initiative’s precise status remained indeterminate.177 Kaprow’s contributions to Project Other Ways were analytical rather than interventionist, and sought to insert distancing effects through which not only could observation be conducted, but its power dynamics analysed. This is perhaps the most valuable legacy of his performances. Although Project Other Ways succumbed to logistical pressures, it represents a significant moment in the Happening’s transformation into a vehicle for facilitating and examining communication –​with all the problems and potential that entailed. Notes 1 Jack Burnham, ‘Systems Esthetics’, Artforum 7, no. 1 (September 1968): 30–​5 (35). 2 Lucas Samaras, interview by Alan Solomon, Artforum 5, no.  2 (October 1966): 39–​44  (41). 3 Burnham, ‘Systems Esthetics’, 31. On Kaprow’s use of the term ‘environment’ in relation to ecological writings, notably Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1961), see James Nisbet, Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 13–​66. 4 Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory:  Foundations, Development, Applications (London: Allen Lane, 1971 [1968]), 43. On Bertalanffy’s systems theory and 1960s art, see Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), particularly 64–​5; and in Burnham’s writings, Luke Skrebowski, ‘The Artist as Homo arbiter formae: Art and Interaction in Jack Burnham’s Systems Essays’, in Practicable:  From Participation to Interaction in Contemporary Art, ed. Samuel Bianchini and Erik Verhagen, with the collaboration of Nathalie Delbard and Larisa Dryansky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 39–​54. 5 Of particular relevance to Kaprow, David Pouvreau notes the roots of general system theory and cybernetics in the work of Jean Piaget, whose challenge to mechanistic behaviourism in child psychology drew on Gestalt theory. David Pouvreau, ‘On the History of Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s “General Systemology”, and on Its Relationship to Cybernetics –​Part II: Contexts and Developments of the Systemological Hermeneutics Instigated by von Bertalanffy’, International Journal of General Systems 43, no. 2 (2014): 172–​245 (226–​7). See also Jean Piaget, The Language and Thought of the Child, trans. Marjorie Gabain and Ruth Gabain, 3rd edn (London: Routledge, 2002 [1993]). 6 Pierre Restany, Guggenheim Foundation reference for Allan Kaprow, 22 November 1976, PREST THE/​PER/​002 (1/​8), Fonds Pierre Restany, Archives de la critique d’art, Rennes. 7 Pierre Restany, ‘Allan Kaprow: From “Happening” to “Activity” ’, Domus 566 (January 1977): I–​II (II). The article appears in French on p. 52; this citation is from the English translation printed on an insert.

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8 Ibid. 9 Jonathan Crary, ‘Allan Kaprow’s “Activities”’, Arts Magazine 51, no. 1 (September 1976): 78–​81  (80). 10 Ibid., 81. 11 It occurred during a weekly talk series organised by Robert Watts; Kaprow later identified Communication as ‘my first public Happening’. Allan Kaprow, ‘Note to Communication, Happening in April, 1958’, n.d., Box 5, Folder 2, Allan Kaprow Papers (980063), Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Douglass College was a women’s college at Rutgers University, where Kaprow and artists, including Watts, taught. On Rutgers as a site of artistic experimentation, see Joan Marter, ed., Off Limits: Rutgers University and the Avant-​Garde, 1957–​1963 (Newark, NJ: Newark Museum, 1999); and Kelly Baum, New Jersey as Non-​Site (Princeton: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013). 12 Kaprow, ‘Note to Communication.’ 13 William R.  Kaizen discusses this action within the context of Kaprow’s development of the Happening, in ‘Framed Space:  Allan Kaprow and the Spread of Painting’, Grey Room 13 (Autumn 2003): 80–​107 (96). 14 Allan Kaprow, ‘Recorded Speech’, n.d., Box 5, Folder 2, Allan Kaprow Papers. 15 Kaprow references his interest in the writings of Goffman and Ray L. Birdwhistell in Allan Kaprow, interview by Moira Roth, Sun & Moon 5 (Fall 1978): 69–​77 (71). Many of Kaprow’s early works deployed vocabularies of ‘ritual’ based on deeply reductive, primitivising understandings of performance in non-​western cultures, of the kind critiqued by Coco Fusco in ‘Introduction: Latin American Performance and the Reconquista of Civil Space’, in Corpus delecti:  Performance Art of the Americas (London: Routledge, 2000), 1–​18 (7). 16 Tom Finkelpearl, ‘Introduction:  The Art of Social Cooperation. An American Framework’, in What We Made:  Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 1–​50 (22). 17 Grove Street was renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Way in 1984. 18 Allan Kaprow, letter to Vivienne Anderson, Director, Division of Humanities and Arts, State Education Department, Albany, NY, 24 December 1968, Box 57A, Folder 1, Allan Kaprow Papers. 19 Ibid. 20 Project Other Ways was also known simply as Other Ways, and Kohl continued to work on the project under this name after he and Kaprow parted. I have used Project Other Ways as that is how Kaprow referred to it subsequently. 21 ‘Current Program of Project Other Ways, ’68–​’69’, 2, Box 57A, Folder 1, Allan Kaprow Papers. 22 The accompanying text read: ‘Snapshoot your friends, your mailman, your breakfast, your trash can, your nose, your stop light, your shadow. Cut them out, paste them up … Suddenly odd people, odd places fall together.’ ‘Photo Play’, n.d., Box 57A, Folder 4, Allan Kaprow Papers. 23 In March 1968 Blau wrote: ‘I don’t know what your situation is at Stony Brook, but I wonder whether you could consider moving to Los Angeles.’ Herbert Blau, letter to Allan Kaprow, 18 March 1968, Box 56, Folder 8, Allan Kaprow Papers.

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24 Allan Kaprow, transcript of interview by Moira Roth, 5 and 18 February 1981, 50, California Oral History Project, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 25 For example, ‘An Institute for Experimental Research in the Arts: A Proposal for the Center for Instructional Resource at SUSB’, c. 1966, Box 47, Folder 11, Allan Kaprow Papers. Kaprow had previously collaborated with Robert Watts and George Brecht on ‘Project in Multiple Dimensions’ (1957–​58), which anticipated Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) in its proposal to foster interdisciplinary artistic experimentation. This document is reproduced in Marter, Off Limits,  153–​9. 26 Allan Kaprow, ‘A Proposal to Bring Professional Artists into the Public Schools’, 28 October 1965, 1, Box 47, Folder 4, Allan Kaprow Papers. Kaprow’s investment in this idea was partly pragmatic, in that early intervention by avant-​garde artists would mean greater visual literacy among the college-​level students he taught. Yet his motivations went further, as his letters to Stony Brook regarding leave for Project Other Ways indicate: ‘I have begun to discover as my own children grew, that I might make a more useful contribution to education, working as an artist with youngsters and their teachers, than as a lecturer in art history.’ Allan Kaprow, letter to Bentley Glass, Academic Vice President, State University of New  York, Stony Brook, 28 May 1968, Box 57A, Folder 1, Allan Kaprow Papers. 27 Jon Rouche, Carnegie Corporation, letter to Allan Kaprow, 30 April 1968, Box 57A, Folder 1, Allan Kaprow Papers. This letter details the grant as $68,000. 28 Allan Kaprow and Herbert R. Kohl, ‘A Joint Program in Arts Education’, n.d., Box 57A, Folder 1, Allan Kaprow Papers. 29 Kaprow, letter to Glass, 28 May 1968. 30 The Age of Complexity interweaves philosophy, psychology, anthropology and sociology, and reflects the pervasive concern with communication that coursed through these disciplines:  ‘at the center of these complementary enterprises lies a common concern with man’s daily life and with his communication’. Herbert R. Kohl, The Age of Complexity (New York: Mentor, 1965), 271–​2. 31 On school segregation and civil rights, see Steve Estes, I Am a Man! Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 39–​59; and on de facto segregation in the north, Jason Sokol, All Eyes Are upon Us: Race and Politics from Boston to Brooklyn (New York: Basic, 2014). Sokol discusses the importance of the work of the African American psychologists Kenneth B.  Clark and Mamie Phipps Clark to the success of Brown vs. Board; Clark’s 1955 book Prejudice and Your Child detailed the negative effects of school segregation on children throughout the country. See Kenneth B. Clark, ‘What Can Schools Do?’, in Prejudice and Your Child (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1955), 85–​94. 32 Herbert R. Kohl, 36 Children (London: Victor Gollancz, 1968), 13. 33 Allan Kaprow, Gas, produced by WCBS-​TV, 1966, 16mm film transferred to VHS, Box 86, V1, Allan Kaprow Papers. 34 Frazier designed a ‘flying maypole’ for Gas adorned with brightly coloured ribbons; unfortunately, the noise from its engine terrified the children. Charles Frazier, ‘From a Work Journal of Flying Sculpture’, Artforum 5, no. 10 (June 1967): 88–​92 (89).

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35 Jeff Kelley, Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 120. 36 Herbert R. Kohl, The Open Classroom: A Practical Guide to a New Way of Teaching (London: Methuen, 1970), 58. 37 Ibid., 66. 38 Ibid., 31. This unprecedented autonomy proved challenging, with Kaprow and Kohl reporting ‘the fundamental difficulty all participants have felt in dealing positively with the freedoms Other Ways offers’ (emphasis in original). ‘Current Program of Project Other Ways, ’68–​’69’, 5. 39 Kohl, The Open Classroom, 44. 40 Jules Henry, Culture against Man (London: Tavistock, 1966 [1963]), 283. 41 Ibid., 289. 42 Ibid., 289–​90. Wiener described how, in communication, ‘we often find a message contaminated by extraneous disturbances which we call background noise’ (italics in original). Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965 [1948]), 10. 43 Kohl and Kaprow never quite went as far as the radical dissolution of schools propounded by Illich in his 1971 book Deschooling Society. Although their approach chimes to some extent with Illich’s rejection of regulation and authority, articulated in statements such as ‘school removes things from everyday use by labeling them educational tools’, they held back from the deregulatory extremes to which Illich’s perspective tends. Ivan D. Illich, Deschooling Society (London: Calder & Boyars, 1971), 80. Illich’s rejection of traditional modes of learning converges with Paulo Freire’s critique of what he terms the ‘banking concept’ of education, a prescriptive, oppressive mechanism of imperialist capitalism that reproduces cultural privilege, while negating ‘education and knowledge as processes of inquiry’. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Continuum, 2003 [1968]), 72. 44 Jules Henry, interview by Roger Barnard, Peace News 1623 (4 August 1967), 5, 8 (8). 45 In 1967 Kaprow was involved in preliminary plans by New York State University for an experimental programme in art education, inviting other artists including Robert Filliou to these discussions. For Filliou’s correspondence with Kaprow on this topic, see Robert Filliou, Teaching and Learning as Performance Arts (London: Occasional Papers, 2014 [1970]), 41–​6. 46 Allan Kaprow, transcript of interview by Dorothy Seckler, 10 September 1968, 34, Dorothy Gees Seckler collection of sound recordings relating to art and artists, 1962–​76, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 47 Ibid., 35. 48 Kohl, The Open Classroom, 51. 49 Allan Kaprow, ‘Event Plan’, n.d., Box 57A, Folder 4, Allan Kaprow Papers. 50 Suzanne Hudson eloquently traces the importance of these ideas for Robert Ryman through their influence on the New York Museum of Modern Art’s educational ethos, particularly in the Education Department under Victor D’Amico’s direction. Suzanne Hudson, Robert Ryman:  Used Paint (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 2009),  27–​51.

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51 Kelley, Childsplay, 142; and Judith F. Rodenbeck, Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 241–​6. Kaprow’s vision of the Happening as a mode of learning through action corresponded with Dewey’s assertion that: ‘the real work of an artist is to build up an experience’. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee, 2005 [1934]), 53. 52 John Dewey, ‘The School and Society’ (1899; rev. 1943), in ‘The Child and the Curriculum’ and ‘The School and Society’ (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1956), 6–​159 (17). 53 John Dewey, Democracy and Education:  An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York: Free Press, 1966 [1916]), 4. 54 C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1959), 106. 55 Project Other Ways Leaflet, n.d., Box 57A, Folder 4, Allan Kaprow Papers. This manifests Kohl’s understanding of the open classroom as an entity that could change location, vividly realised through the walks he took one class on around their community to visit ‘factories, the university, artists’ studios, chemical laboratories, film studios, people’s houses, supermarkets, furniture stores … Not everything we saw was pleasant.’ Kohl, The Open Classroom, 74. 56 ‘Current Program of Project Other Ways, ’68–​’69’, 3. One document also references Nam June Paik, David Antin and Anna Halprin as participating artists, but ultimately they do not seem to have been involved. ‘Other Ways: Participating Artists’, n.d., Box 57A, Folder 1, Allan Kaprow Papers. 57 Meetings took place for each Happening the previous day, as noted on the accompanying poster. The poster is a post facto construct, however, in that it features images produced during the Happenings. In addition to Six Ordinary Happenings, Kaprow sent students out to conduct questionnaires of their own devising in public spaces such as supermarkets: ‘we brought all of these experiences back to our storefront and we discussed them, and this is a way of dealing with civics’. Kaprow, interview by Roth, 1981, 51. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 The article was illustrated, but with street photography and found imagery rather than pictures of Happenings, to convey ‘the importance of the non-​art world for the substance and form of the Happenings’. Allan Kaprow, ‘The Happenings are Dead –​Long Live the Happenings!’, Artforum 4, no. 7 (March 1966): 36–​9 (37). 61 Kelley, Childsplay, 130. 62 Rodenbeck, Radical Prototypes, 230; Rodenbeck also analyses how Kaprow’s 1968 Happening Record II reflected on the act of photographing performance (231–​40). 63 This perspective has been influentially expounded by Peggy Phelan, who links performance with ephemerality, arguing that it ‘clogs the smooth machinery of reproductive representation necessary to the circulation of capital’. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 2006 [1993]), 148. 64 Alex Potts, Experiments in Modern Realism:  World Making, Politics and the Everyday in Postwar European and American Art (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2013), 355.

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65 Photographs from Six Ordinary Happenings were included in the boxed multiple Artists and Photographs in 1970, alongside conceptual works by Mel Bochner, Dan Graham, Bruce Nauman and Ed Ruscha. See Artists and Photographs (New York: Multiples Inc., 1970). 66 Lawrence Alloway, ‘Allan Kaprow, Two Views’ (first published as two separate pieces: ‘Art in Escalation: The History of Happenings. A Question of Sources’, Arts Magazine 42, no. 3 (December 1966–​January 1967): 40–​3; and ‘Art’, The Nation (20 October 1969)), in Topics in American Art since 1945 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1975): 195–​200 (200). 67 In arguments that have become foundational for theorising performance art and mediation, Amelia Jones and Philip Auslander propose that documentation plays as important a role as the live act. See Amelia Jones, ‘“Presence” in Absentia:  Experiencing Performance as Documentation’, Art Journal 56, no. 4 (Winter 1997):  11–​18; and Philip Auslander, ‘The Performativity of Performance Documentation’, PAJ:  A Journal of Performance and Art 28, no. 3 (September 2006): 1–​10. Auslander builds on the philosopher J. L. Austin’s notion of the performative speech act to argue that this is a quality of documentation as much as of performance. Elucidating his use of the term performative to describe speech acts that bring new situations into being, Austin explained: ‘The name is derived, of course, from “perform”, the usual verb with the noun “action”: it indicates that the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action  –​it is not normally thought of as just saying something.’ J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976 [1962]),  6–​7. 68 Allan Kaprow, quoted in Thomas Albright, ‘What Would Happen if …?’, San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle (18 May 1969), 37, Box 16, Folder 3, Allan Kaprow Papers. 69 Nicolas Bourriaud controversially insisted on the innately convivial nature of contemporary art using interaction during the 1990s, characterising the results as ‘micro-​utopias’, in which ‘heterogeneous forms of sociability are worked out’. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods, with Mathieu Copeland (Dijon:  Les Presses du réel, 2002 [1998]), 31. Bourriaud’s emphasis on conviviality has been rigorously critiqued, particularly by Claire Bishop, who deploys Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s writings on political hegemony to argue that antagonism and conflict are vital to relational art’s democratic function, but also by scholars of the early Happenings, such as Rodenbeck, who have emphasised their coercive aspects. Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October 110 (Autumn 2004): 51–​79 (65–​7); and Rodenbeck, Radical Prototypes, particularly 241–​55. 70 On the Diggers’ ‘free’ network, see Karen M. Staller, Runaways:  How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped Today’s Practices and Policies (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2006), 73–​96; and for a primary account, Emmett Grogan, Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps (London: Heinemann, 1972), 247–​50. The gesture also resonates with the free school-​meal programmes established by the Black Panthers, on which see Mary Potorti, ‘“Feeding the Revolution”: The Black Panther

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Party, Hunger, and Community Survival’, Journal of African American Studies 21 (2017): 85–​110 –​the crucial difference, of course, being that Kaprow provided the tools but no actual food, underscoring the distinction that his Happenings made between politicised gesture and activist intervention. 7 1 Thomas Albright, ‘Heavy Slices of Existence’, Rolling Stone (12 July 1969): 20–​2 (21). 72 Allan Kaprow, quoted in ibid. 73 Kaprow, quoted in Albright, ‘What Would Happen if …?’, 37. 74 Allan Kaprow, ‘Mid Twentieth Century Environments and Happenings’, in The Changing World and Man:  The Cultural and Social Environment of Man, Its Significance for His Biological Performance, ed. Chandler McC. Brooks (Albany: State University of New York, 1970), 83–​96 (95). This statement appeared among treatises by sociologists and urban planners, illuminating Kaprow’s social science ambitions. Elsewhere, Kaprow referred to his work as a form of ‘social art’. Allan Kaprow, letter to Wilder Green, Office of the Director, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1 December 1969, Box 17, Folder 5, Allan Kaprow Papers. 75 Pierre Bourdieu, with Luc Boltanski, Robert Castel, Jean-​Claude Chamboredon and Dominique Schnapper, Photography:  A Middle-​ Brow Art, trans. Shaun Whiteside (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990 [1965]), 38. 76 Charles Wollenberg records that this invisible line became entrenched in the 1920s, when ‘real-​estate brokers tried to prevent people of color from buying or renting in other “white” areas of the city’. As a result, ‘almost all Asian and black Berkeleyans lived south of Dwight Way and west of Grove Street’. Charles Wollenberg, Berkeley: A City in History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 82. 77 Donna Jean Murch observes that the Afro-​American Association (AAA), a study group that emerged among University of California graduates galvanised by a campaign to bring Malcolm X to speak in 1961, and that recruited from colleges across the Bay Area, established its offices at 422 Grove Street. This was opposite Merritt College, an epicentre for black student activism that would result in its early Black Studies programme. Donna Jean Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 106. 78 Kaprow later recounted how Project Other Ways was partnered with a sixth-​grade class from Oakland, ‘whose kids were considered unteachable illiterates. I forget the official label but it was enough to sentence them to permanent societal rejection.’ Allan Kaprow, ‘Success and Failure when Art Changes’, in Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, ed. Suzanne Lacy (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 152–​8 (152). 79 Murch, Living for the City, particularly 15–​40. 80 Newton and Seale met while studying at Merritt College. In his autobiography, Newton powerfully condemned the systematic racism that black students endured in Oakland’s public schools:  ‘Our image of ourselves was defined for us by textbooks and teachers. We not only accepted ourselves as inferior; we accepted the inferiority as inevitable and inescapable.’ Huey P. Newton with J. Herman Blake, Revolutionary Suicide (London: Wildwood House, 1974), 20. 81 Wollenberg, Berkeley,  133–​4.

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82 On Kaprow’s belated engagement with the gendered aspects of the everyday after his encounter with feminism in the 1970s, see Anna Dezeuze, Almost Nothing:  Observations on Precarious Practices in Contemporary Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 295–​6. The power imbalances of socially engaged art and the tensions around definitions of community in participatory practice are addressed with relevance for Project Other Ways in Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another:  Site-​Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). 83 Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, trans. Rela Mazali and Ruvik Danieli (New York: Zone, 2008), 119. 84 This correlates with Azoulay’s notion that photography constitutes a ‘social contract’. Although the photographs Azoulay examines were taken in very different conditions than those made during Kaprow’s Happenings, the role of photography in his performances might also be said to afford ‘enough distance to view a different type of relation between human beings, between the governed, in the framework of which the citizen aims to break away from his or her status as citizen and exercise citizenship  –​that is, to turn citizenship into the arena of constant becoming, together with other (non)citizens’ (italics in original). Ibid., 118. 85 Kaprow, interview by Seckler, 34. 86 ‘Nearly a hundred photos were projected at random on a screen and the tapes were played over a loudspeaker.’ Allan Kaprow, Travelog, 1968, Box 14, Folder 5, Allan Kaprow Papers. 87 ‘Travelog’, Kaprow noted, ‘sounded like pedagog [sic] and ship’s log’. Although aspects of the Happening echo the genre of the travelogue, which developed from the practice of giving lectures illustrated with images of places and people, ‘travelog’ was primarily concerned with the sociological ‘logging’ of data, rather than personal narratives. Ibid. 88 Kaprow, interview by Seckler, 34. The photographs could serve as illustrations for Daniel Bell’s study The Coming of Post-​Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, published five years later in 1973. 89 Kaprow, Travelog, 1968. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid. 92 In the first of his ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’, Karl Marx expounded the concept of alienated labour, whereby ‘the worker is related to the product of his labour as to an alien object. For it is clear on this presupposition that the more the worker expends himself in work the more powerful becomes the world of objects which he creates … the poorer he becomes in his inner life, and the less he belongs to himself ’ (italics in original). Karl Marx, ‘First Manuscript’, ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’ (1844), in Karl Marx:  Early Writings, ed. and trans. T. B. Bottomore (London: C. A. Watts, 1963), 67–​134 (122). 93 In July 1965 Polaroid introduced its cheapest and most lightweight camera to date, the Model 20 Land Camera (or ‘Swinger’), retailing at $19.95. These cameras still

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involved some work on the part of the photographer in terms of timing the development and peeling the print from the negative, but Travelog participants would have been able to share their photographs with their subjects. Peter Buse, The Camera Does the Rest: How Polaroid Changed Photography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 30. 94 Kaprow, Travelog, 1968. 95 Martha Buskirk notes that Kaprow ‘became increasingly suspicious of the relay function of photography, whether as a stand-​in for the otherwise ephemeral or a template for its reconstruction’. Martha Buskirk, Creative Enterprise: Contemporary Art between Museum and Marketplace (New York: Continuum, 2012), 118. 96 Kaprow, interview by Seckler, 37. 97 Bourdieu, Photography, 98. 98 Ibid.,  35–​6. 99 Ed Ruscha, ‘Concerning “Various Small Fires” ’, interview by John Coplans, Artforum 3, no. 5 (February 1965): 24–​5 (25). Joshua Shannon connects Ruscha’s fascination with the status of photographic information to the Cold War period’s ‘complicated relationships to facts, to evidence, and to science’. Joshua Shannon, The Recording Machine:  Art and Fact during the Cold War (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2017), 24. On the correspondences between the chance theory developed in the context of the Cold War and conceptual photography, see also Robin Kelsey, Photography and the Art of Chance (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015), 284–​310. 100 Ruscha, ‘Concerning “Various Small Fires” ’, 25. 101 Jurgen Ruesch and Weldon Kees, Nonverbal Communication: Notes on the Visual Perception of Human Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 3. 102 Allan Kaprow, quoted in Noel Lieberman, ‘Hard Lessons the Easy Way’, Oakland Tribune (4 June 1969), Box 16, Folder 3, Allan Kaprow Papers. 103 Ruscha, ‘Concerning “Various Small Fires” ’, 25. 104 Ibid., 25. 105 Margaret Iversen, ‘Auto-​Maticity:  Ruscha and Performative Photography’, Art History 32, no. 5 (December 2009): 836–​51 (842). 106 Ibid., 845. 107 Just as Ruesch and Wees relied on photography to capture instances of nonverbal communication, Birdwhistell used film to conduct microanalysis of behavioural units. See Martha Davis, ‘Film Projectors as Microscopes: Ray L. Birdwhistell and Microanalysis of Interaction (1955–​1975)’, Visual Anthropology Review 17, no. 2 (Fall 2001–​Winter 2002): 39–​49. 108 Ray L. Birdwhistell, ‘There Was a Child Went Forth …’ (1959), in Kinesics and Context:  Essays on Body-​Motion Communication (London:  Allen Lane, 1971), 3–​11  (7). 109 Birdwhistell argued that ‘if we recognize that our communication system is not something we invent but rather something which we internalized in the process of becoming human, we must study the socialization process if we are to

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isolate those factors which contribute to mislearning or misusing this system.’ Ray L. Birdwhistell, ‘The Age of a Baby’ (1959), in Kinesics and Context, 11–​23 (15). 110 Kaprow, interview by Roth, 1978, 71. 111 Allan Kaprow, ‘The Artist as a Man of the World’ (1964), in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 53; and Kaprow, interview by Seckler, 28. Robert E. Haywood briefly but compellingly addresses the overlap between Kaprow’s politics and the New Left, particularly the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)’s 1962 Port Huron Statement. Robert E. Haywood, Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg: Art, Happenings, and Cultural Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 83–​9. 112 On Angry Arts, see Francis Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 108–​59. 113 Allan Kaprow, score for Flick, 1967, Box 12, Folder 1, Allan Kaprow Papers. 114 Ibid. Flick seems to have been one of the Happenings Masotta attended during his second visit to New York in early 1967; Andrea Giunta cites a letter he wrote to Jorge Romero Brest about the experience (although the letter is dated to 1966, Masotta’s detailed reference to Angry Arts Week places it in his 1967 visit). Andrea Giunta, Avant-​Garde, Internationalism, and Politics: Argentine Art in the Sixties, trans. Peter Kahn (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007 [2001]), 184–​5. 115 Napalm had ‘vivid contemporary resonance’ at this point in the conflict. Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent, 118. 116 Carolee Schneemann’s work Snows for Angry Arts Week similarly emphasised the reciprocity between spectators and the atrocities presented onstage. 117 Kaprow, ‘The Happenings are Dead –​Long Live the Happenings!’, 39. 118 Kelley, Childsplay, 120. 119 Allan Kaprow, score for Interruption, 1967, Box 12, Folder 3, Allan Kaprow Papers. 120 ‘We and scores of other faculty members work in the Humanities Building. So do hundreds of students, not all of whom, we are sure, wish to involve themselves in “Interruption” ’. Members of the Department of Arts and Humanities, State University of New York, Stony Brook, letter to Allan Kaprow, 10 May 1967, Box 12, Folder 3, Allan Kaprow Papers. 121 Joy Aschenbach and Robert Mayer, ‘As an Art Form, It Happened to be a Fire Hazard’, Newsday (12 May 1967): 40, Box 12, Folder 3, Allan Kaprow Papers. 122 Douglas Davis, ‘Following the Script of a Happening’, The National Observer (12 June 1967): 20, Box 12, Folder 3, Allan Kaprow Papers. 123 On the history of the Free Speech Movement, see Robert Cohen and Reginald E.  Zelnik, eds., The Free Speech Movement:  Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 124 Ike Clanton, ‘What It Means’, Berkeley Tribe (18–​24 July 1969): 3. 125 Kaprow, ‘Success and Failure when Art Changes’, 152. 126 While some parked cars failed to attract attention, other participants reported charged encounters with law enforcement:  ‘same policeman came by –​honked for us to move … threatened us w/​jail if we wouldn’t move –​told him we wanted

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a ticket –​he wouldn’t give it to us’. Participant report for Fine!, n.d., Box 16, Folder 3, Allan Kaprow Papers. 127 Haywood deems Fine! the most ‘subtle and scandalous’ of Kaprow’s Six Ordinary Happenings, proposing that ‘the camera provided students with an instrument … to throw off-​center and reverse their passive subordination in the face of authority’. Haywood, Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg, 177, 178. However, these confrontations with the state would have been far more dangerous for any students of colour, and it is not evident that Kaprow gave this any consideration. 128 Kaprow, interview by Roth, 1981, 50. 129 ‘AP’, 19 April 1969, Box 16, Folder 4, Allan Kaprow Papers. Presumably written by Kaprow, possibly for the Associated Press to release with the photographs. 130 Similarly, Kaprow’s Happening Don’t, produced in 1970 for the Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation, explored ‘the social restrictions which all of us feel at some time’ by addressing the feelings of the participating students about prohibited areas of public space. Allan Kaprow, score for Don’t, 1970, Box 18, Folder 5, Allan Kaprow Papers. 131 Eva J. Friedberg argues that the experiments of practitioners such as Anna and Lawrence Halprin on the West Coast went well beyond Kaprow’s comparatively hidebound approach. Eva J.  Friedberg, ‘Collective Movement:  Anna and Lawrence Halprin’s Joint Workshop’, in West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965–​ 1977, ed. Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press and Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, 2012), 23–​41 (25). While Kaprow was, by his own admission, an ‘old “company man” ’, and remained closely tied to institutional structures throughout his career, Project Other Ways challenges such clear divisions. Its interdisciplinary status complicates the ‘art/​life’ boundary in a way that goes beyond antiformalist rhetoric. Kaprow self-​description as a ‘company man’ occurs in a letter to Luis Camnitzer, 7 June 1968, Box 14, Folder 5, Allan Kaprow Papers. 132 Meiling Cheng, In Other Los Angeleses:  Multicentric Performance Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 35. Cheng relates this to Kaprow’s move into teaching performance, first at CalArts and then at the University of California, San Diego. 133 Kaprow, interview by Roth, 1981, 56. 134 Ibid. 135 The performative aspect of pedagogy can be traced through a number of artistic interventions and theoretical texts: for example Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling:  Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2003); and José Esteban Muñoz, ‘Teaching, Minoritarian Knowledge, and Love’, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 14, no. 2 (2005): 117–​21. Adair Rounthwaite assesses the relationship between pedagogy and participatory practice in 1980s New  York in ‘The Pedagogical Subject of Participation’, in Asking the Audience:  Participatory Art in 1980s New  York (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 75–​111.

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136 This continued the concerns Mills had outlined in The Sociological Imagination, particularly 100–​18. 137 Alvin W. Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (London: Heinemann, 1971), 12. 138 Doug McAdam, ‘From Relevance to Irrelevance:  The Curious Impact of the Sixties on Public Sociology’, in Sociology in America: A History, ed. Craig Calhoun (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 411–​26 (421). See also in the same volume Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘The Culture of Sociology in Disarray: The Impact of 1968 on US Sociologists’, 427–​37. 139 Bertalanffy, General System Theory, 207. See also Talcott Parsons, The Social System (New York: Free Press, 1964 [1951]). 140 Goffman strongly critiqued the ‘traditional social control approach’, but also made parallels between it and cybernetics, arguing that both assumed ‘an unrealistically mechanistic version of the social act, a restriction that must be relaxed if the close analysis of social control is to be achieved’. Erving Goffman, Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order (London: Allen Lane, 1971), 349. 141 The calendar briefly became Kaprow’s calling card; it featured, for example, in Germano Celant, ‘Archivio: Allan Kaprow’, Sipario 287 (March 1970): 21–​6. 142 Jorge Glusberg, ‘Art Systems’, in Arte de sistemas (Buenos Aires: Museo de Arte Moderno/​Centro de Arte y Comunicación, 1971), n.p. As Elena Shtromberg notes, Glusberg does not ever seem to have cited Burnham directly. Elena Shtromberg, Art Systems: Brazil and the 1970s (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016), 3. 143 These connections extended beyond the exhibitions: in 1972, when the military closed a CAYC exhibition in the Plaza Roberto Arlt in Buenos Aires because of its political content, and threatened Glusberg with imprisonment, Kaprow helped draft a statement on behalf of CalArts expressing alarm at the situation. Allan Kaprow and John Baldessari, statement printed in ‘Comunicado no.  5’, Centro de Arte y Comunicación, Buenos Aires, n.d., PREST TOP AML 006 (3/​4), Fonds Pierre Restany. 144 Entry in Jorge Glusberg, Art Systems in Latin America (London:  Institute of Contemporary Arts/​Centro de Arte y Comunicación, 1974), n.p. 145 Until early 1969, Kaprow tried to establish a New York branch of Project Other Ways, but tensions blossomed between him and Kohl. While Kohl acknowledged that Six Ordinary Happenings ‘went off very well’ and that ‘an openness to contemporary art forms’ had undeniably resulted, he acidly accused Kaprow of limited commitment: ‘you began a teachers seminar and then copped out. You began a class of Happenings for high school students and then copped out. You visited a class at Willard Junior High School once and then disappeared and turned the teaching over to me. You did the same thing at Columbus School.’ Herbert R. Kohl, letter to Allan Kaprow, 17 June 1969, Box 64, Folder 14, Allan Kaprow Papers. Kohl continued to run the programme and secure further funding; by 1970 he was planning to operate Other Ways as an alternative school for around 100 students. ‘Other Ways 69–​70’, Box 57A, Folder 4, Allan Kaprow Papers. A protracted legal

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wangle over copyright for elements of Project Other Ways fills Box 64, Folder 14 of the Allan Kaprow Papers. 146 ‘Teen-​agers Fight for a New School’, 14 May 1969; and ‘ “Other Ways” Needs Funding’, 29 May 1969, clippings from unknown publications in Box 16, Folder 1, Allan Kaprow Papers. 147 The engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer, together with Whitman and Robert Rauschenberg, established E.A.T.  in 1967. It emerged from 9 Evenings:  Theatre & Engineering at the New York 25th Street Armory on Third Avenue in 1966. It operated primarily as a matching agency between artists and engineers, whom Klüver had access to through his employment at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Kaprow submitted his details to E.A.T., and was also selected by the organisation for the programming at the Pepsi Pavilion they designed for Expo ’70 in Osaka. However, Pepsi famously got cold feet and cancelled the activities, meaning that Kaprow never got to realise Heavenly Pass-​Time –​Year 2000, which would have involved participants shooting lasers at each other off the dome’s mirrored interior. For a history of the Osaka Pavilion, see Billy Klüver, Julie Martin and Barbara Rose, eds., Pavilion (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972); Kaprow’s score and correspondence with the E.A.T.  engineer Elsa Garmire can be found on 295–​7. See also Hiroko Ikegami, ‘“World without Boundaries”? E.A.T.  and the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ’70, Osaka’, Review of Japanese Culture and Society 23 (December 2011): 174–​90. 148 Experiments in Art and Technology, ‘Projects Outside Art’, press release, 2 March 1970, Box 34, Folder 12, Allan Kaprow Papers. Kaprow applied to Projects Outside Art, and was selected for a team managed by E.A.T. Los Angeles ascribed the theme ‘Recreation and Play’, but their collaboration fell apart. Kaprow complained to Klüver that his work could just as easily have fitted into ‘the “children’s communication” category which you assigned to others in N.Y.C.’. Allan Kaprow, letter to Billy Klüver, 24 October 1970, Box 34, Folder 12, Allan Kaprow Papers. 149 Barry Kaplan, observations on Children and Communication, April 1971, 1–​2, Box 61, Folder 4, Experiments in Art and Technology Records (940003), Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. 150 Michelle Kuo, ‘No Limits’, in E.A.T.:  Experiments in Art and Technology, ed. Sabine Breitwieser (Salzburg: Museum der Moderne and Walther König, 2015), 163–​81 (174). Kuo documents that E.A.T.  conducted research in ‘developmental psychology, educational theory, and communications’ to prepare for the project, and that the NYU Institute for Developmental Studies drafted a proposal for a ‘Curriculum of the Future’ based on the experiment (175). 151 Experiments in Art and Technology, ‘Children and Communication’, 24 September 1970, 1, Box 61, Folder 4, Experiments in Art and Technology Records. 152 Kaplan, observations on Children and Communication, 2. 153 Julie Martin, ‘ “Creating a Living Responsive Environment” ’, Interview by Christophe Leclercq, in Practicable, 563. 154 Kuo, ‘No Limits’, 175. 155 Kaplan, observations on Children and Communication, 4.

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156 Kaprow described Sales Pitch, the work he proposed for Projects Outside Art, as a ‘prototype’ for Hello, aligning the latter with E.A.T.’s interests. Kaprow, letter to Klüver, 24 October 1970. 157 Allan Kaprow, ‘Hello: Plan and Execution’, Art-​Rite 7 (Autumn 1974): 17–​18 (17). 158 Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: Studio Vista, 1970), 343. 159 Erika Balsom, ‘On the Grid’, in Electronic Superhighway: From Experiments in Art and Technology to Art after the Internet, ed. Omar Kholeif (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2016), 46. 160 That said, Douglas Davis recounts how Kaprow incorporated video into his performance teaching at CalArts, using it as a tool for students to track ‘their own daily, recorded “life systems” and study those of others’, with the result that videotape ‘supplanted both paperwork and books as educational-​communicative agents’. Douglas Davis, Art and the Future: A History/​Prophecy of the Collaboration between Science, Technology and Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 88. 161 Kaprow has described his encounter with consciousness raising: ‘what I learned was a form I  adopted very, very quickly, which was the form used in the CR [consciousness raising] groups of the round, free talking, without interruptions about some recent or close experience’. In Allan Kaprow, Eleanor Antin, Chris Burden, Charles Garoian, Barbara Smith, Cheri Gaulke et al., ‘Ten from Academe:  Ten Artists Talk about Teaching Performance’, interviews by Janet Frye McCambridge, High Performance Magazine 4, no.  1 (issue 13)  (Spring 1981): 60–​3, 66–​9, 72–​5, 78 (61). There are undeniable elements of appropriation in Kaprow’s embrace of CR. 162 Allan Kaprow, Comfort Zones, 1975, n.p., Box 26, Folder 7, Allan Kaprow Papers. Kaprow maintained that the booklets produced to accompany activities were not didactic, but rather prompts to action equivalent to musical notation. The activities themselves were ‘transactions for people being themselves in circumstances resembling real life in some unusual way’. Allan Kaprow, ‘How to Use the Videotapes and Booklets’, January 1981, Box 34, Folder 10, Allan Kaprow Papers. During the 1970s, Kaprow’s scores became increasingly conceptual:  see Glenn Phillips, ‘Time Pieces’, in Allan Kaprow  –​Art as Life, ed. Eva Meyer-​Hermann, Andrew Perchuk and Stephanie Rosenthal (London: Thames and Hudson and the Getty Research Institute, 2008), 34–​41 (37). 163 Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual:  Essays on Face-​ to-​ Face Behaviour (London: Allen Lane, 1972 [1967]), 1. 164 Kaprow, Comfort Zones, n.p. 165 This is particularly apparent in works such as Blindsight (1979) at Wichita State University’s College of Arts, supported by Wichita Public Schools and the Department of Education. Blindsight emphasised nonverbal communication, requiring young children and their parents to try and paint each other’s shadows on the ground. At the end, parents submitted voluminous reports scrutinising their own and their children’s behaviour. These can be found in Box 29, Folder 1, Allan Kaprow Papers.

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166 Allan Kaprow, ‘Proposal of Basic Research (behind the Scenes) for Documenta 1977’, Box 28, Folder 4, Allan Kaprow Papers. 167 Kaprow’s proposal was presumably also overshadowed by Joseph Beuys’s Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research, held over the 100-​day exhibition. 168 Kaprow, ‘Proposal of Basic Research.’ As well as the work of E.A.T., this proposal also evokes the Artist Placement Group (APG) in the UK, which arranged residencies in industry for artists during the 1960 and 1970s. 169 On the exhibition’s history see Mary Jane Jacob, Michael Brenson and Eva M. Olson, Culture in Action: A Public Art Program of Sculpture Chicago (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995); and Joshua Decter and Helmut Draxler, Exhibition as Social Intervention:  ‘Culture in Action’ 1993 (London:  Afterall, 2014). See also Kwon’s important critique of the show’s construction of ‘community’ in One Place after Another, 100–​37. 170 Suzanne Lacy, ‘Introduction: Cultural Pilgrimages and Metaphoric Journeys’, in Mapping the Terrain, 19–​47 (19). 171 For an overview see Nato Thompson, ed., Living as Form:  Socially Engaged Art from 1991–​2011 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). 172 Lacy emphasises Kaprow’s influence on ‘American public art of the transient and political variety’ and feminist practice. Suzanne Lacy, ‘Tracing Allan Kaprow’ (2007), in Leaving Art: Writings on Performance, Politics, and Publics, 1974–​2007 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 319–​25 (319). 173 Kaprow, ‘Success and Failure when Art Changes’, 155. 174 Ibid., 156. 175 Ibid., 157. 176 See Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’; and Grant Kester, The One and the Many:  Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 19–​65. 177 Kaprow, ‘Success and Failure when Art Changes’, 154.

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Kaprow’s conviction that the Happening could operate as a tool for communications analysis was informed by his awareness of how artists working transnationally, particularly from Argentina, were developing and adapting its premises. This was due in no small measure to the eye-​catching, provocative activities of Marta Minujín, whom Kaprow made sure to meet when she travelled to New York between 1965 and 1966.1 Minujín had launched herself into an international performance art network through two trips to Paris in the early 1960s, where she encountered artists including Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely and Jean-​Jacques Lebel. On her second visit, as well as participating in a programme of Happenings organised by Lebel at the Raymond Cordier Gallery in June 1963, she also invited several artists connected with Nouveau Réalisme to alter and destroy her assemblage sculptures, ultimately immolating them on a flaming pyre. With this dramatic Happening, titled, naturally, La destrucción (The Destruction), Minujín achieved a spectacular coup, immortalised by Shunk-​Kender (the photographic duo Harry Shunk and János Kender, who documented many Happenings in Europe and the USA during this period) (Figure 2.1). It established a young, Argentine woman artist in the role of a director who could commandeer the labour of others, blurred the binaries of centre–​periphery locational constructs, and cannily transformed the barriers attendant on selling experimental works to Parisian dealers into a promotional opportunity.2 Although La destrucción occurred four years after Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, it testifies to a geographic diversity that undermines prevailing tendencies to historicise the Happening as a primarily Euro-​American phenomenon. Yet Minujín’s performances did not simply replicate the cross-​cultural interactions fostered by an ephemeral, mobile art form. They actively assessed the power dynamics involved in their own creation, investigating the fluid interpellation of cultural, social, economic and political capital within increasingly globalised networks of influence. This approach was partly the result of the analytical reception of the Happening in Argentina, where its connections

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Marta Minujín, La destrucción (The Destruction), 1963, Happening at the Impasse Ronsin, Paris. Photograph by Shunk-​Kender.

with internationalism and cultural imperialism were intently interrogated. Minujín was moreover spurred by the enthusiasm for sociology and psychology in Argentina and the USA, deploying the tools for interpersonal and psychological investigation developed by these fields to construct her performances, often from the deliberately assumed position of cultural outsider, while simultaneously embracing countercultural states that stood in stark contrast to their potentially disciplinary effects. Minujín’s engagement with communication resulted from her obsession with sociability. Communication was primarily a means to an end:  obtaining understanding of, and leverage within, social groupings and hierarchies. Minujín’s peripatetic movement between Latin America, Europe and the USA during the 1960s and 1970s partly explains why, despite having achieved celebrity status in Argentina (where, as Inés Katzenstein observes, she is ‘practically a TV star’) her work has only gradually been integrated into wider histories of Pop art and performance.3 Even in Argentina, her output can seem anomalous, despite –​perhaps even because of –​its visibility. In her study of art and internationalism in 1960s Argentina, Andrea Giunta describes how the media transformed Minujín ‘into a fetish, a celebrated personality’ who could

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‘establish and legitimize Argentine art throughout the world’.4 Minujín’s fame and media savvy have fomented critical suspicion, making it easy to dismiss her work as sensationalist. Claire Bishop allows that the artist’s performances manifest ‘an aggressivity belied by her colourful persona and fashionable media presence, in structure if not always in realisation’, but remains unconvinced by this jarring conflation of registers.5 Minujín received significant support from the Torcuato Di Tella Institute as part of its internationalist drive, and her work sits in uneasy relation to the more politicised modes of media and conceptual practice that reacted against the repression following General Juan Carlos Onganía’s June 1966 coup.6 The politics of Minujín’s work, I propose, developed in a different direction. Although by no means divorced from the Argentine context, Minujín focused instead on the opportunities and imbalances of cross-​cultural communication, and the behavioural regulation self-​imposed by individuals and groups during socialisation.7 Her work exhibited a consistent fascination with extrapolating communication patterns from different communities, but having discovered the social arrangements of various factions, Minujín increasingly sought to disrupt them and champion improvisatory relations instead. What is especially salutary about Minujín’s performances is their awareness that such gestures of breakout or breakdown are inherently mediated, caught up in endless feedback loops of interaction and interdependence. The sociology of socialising During May 1968, nestled in the busy advertising pages of the New York Times, Village Voice and Women’s Wear Daily, a small but declamatory announcement vied for readers: ‘Attention everyone in business, fashion, art, politics: join us in Minucode’ (Figure 2.2). Respondents were asked to complete and return a lightning-​quick survey: having aligned themselves with business, fashion, art or politics, could they describe their activity in their field? Were they involved in any of the other three areas? What materials (options included lights, sounds, movies, TV, moving screens and slide projections) ‘turned them on’? Candidates had to identify as either ‘participant’ or ‘leader’, and were informed that, if successful, they would be invited to a cocktail party at the Center for Inter-​American Relations (CIAR; now the Americas Society) on Park Avenue. The questionnaire alerted prospective attendees that they would become part of a ‘social environment’, indicating that a more complex agenda was in play than at the average cocktail gathering.8 The advert (and presumably the lure of alcohol) was successful. Crowds descended on the CIAR across four evenings from 20 to 23 May as Minujín hosted her social environment, encouraging people from business, fashion, art and politics to schmooze over drinks.

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2.2 Minucode survey, Women’s Wear Daily 116, no. 89 (6 May 1968): 16.

The event photographs  –​which could double as any number of images from private views, fashion-​industry after-​parties or business launches  –​ show well-​dressed, coiffured figures leaning into each other as they converse, sipping cocktails and performing the social façades demanded by their professional roles (Figure 2.3). Every night, the self-​identified ‘leaders’ were taken to a separate room where, guided by the artist Tony Martin, they cut out pieces

Marta Minujín’s sociability experiments

Marta Minujín, Minucode, May 1968, environment at the Center for Inter-​American Relations, New York City.

of coloured celluloid and placed them onto projectors to create an improvised light show. This activity was not the only thing distinguishing Minucode from, as the New Yorker put it, ‘the hundreds of ordinary cocktail parties given in New York art galleries each year’. Another defining, if disconcerting, feature was the ‘complete absence of paintings, sculptures, graphics’ at this apparent art event.9 Instead, each evening three 16mm film cameras mounted on tripods tracked the participants with their invasive gaze. As Minujín revealed, this

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initial phase was actually preliminary to the ‘real project’, during which the subjects would be ‘totalized by the mass media communications’.10 Emulating the pendant structure of Simultaneidad en simultaneidad, Minucode’s second section saw participants invited back to the CIAR several weeks later. On this occasion, they watched as their mediatised simulacra were screened over the walls, enveloping them in a bright, totalising blur of flickering, whirring movement. Minujín explicitly presented Minucode as a sociological study in which she knowingly performed the participant-​observer role, highlighting ‘the sociological connotations that surround the project’ and stressing that this ‘social-​ scientific atmosphere’ constituted ‘the main element of Minucode’s realization’.11 Through its two-​part structure, Minujín desired her participants to ‘look for themselves in the projections … to see themselves “backward”, to observe their own behaviors, to watch their own social interactions’ and ‘possibly to change some of their attitudes’, conveying her fascination with the bodily performance and self-​scrutiny demanded by sociability.12 In a statement from the 1960s, Minujín summarised her practice as: ‘environmental circuits–​festivals–​ lights–​shows–​works in technology and sociology’.13 The critic Grace Glueck characterised Minucode as ‘celluloid sociology’, evoking the conjunction of mass media and popular sociology that such performances implemented and scrutinised, as well as Minujín’s irreverent, sometimes antagonistic relationship with social science.14 Scholars have alighted on this aspect of Minucode, with Katzenstein connecting Minujín’s ‘interest in social behaviors’, and her delight in the ‘privileged lens’ of the questionnaire, to sociology’s popularity in Argentina during the 1960s.15 Alexander Alberro weighs Minucode’s sociological claims, observing that, as the attendees were engulfed by the filmic record of their interactions during the second section, they were ‘rendered “real and visible” to themselves as performers in the social environment’’16 Alberro concludes, however, that Minucode’s sociological paraphernalia was a red herring:  ‘the content of Minucode was the medium. Information was brushed against information. The particular type of information was irrelevant; what mattered was its interplay with other information.’17 In this respect, Alberro takes his cue from Minujín, who baulked at extrapolating conclusions from her performance: ‘I’ll leave that for the sociologists.’18 Yet the specific type of information at stake in Minucode –​the extensive, byzantine knowledge economy of culturally specific social communication –​was of crucial importance to its operation. An obsession with sociability  –​how it happens, its manipulations, inclusions and exclusions –​lay at the heart of the performance. This is powerfully conveyed by Minucode’s correspondences with studies of socialisation in the USA during the late 1950s and early 1960s, notably an initiative led by the sociologist David Riesman, entitled the Sociability Project. Based at the

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University of Chicago and funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and the Public Health Service, the Sociability Project was a participant-​ observation endeavour that sought to determine formulas for conviviality through the study of cocktail parties. It was rooted in Riesman’s best-​selling 1950 study The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, in which he coined the term ‘other-​directed’.19 This described a new metropolitan, media-​literate, managerial character type that Riesman argued relied on the ability to make friends and influence people to get ahead in the postindustrial age. The success of ‘other-​directed’ people was predicated on their capacity to interpret the information signals relayed during group communication. Under such conditions, play, leisure and sociability were not respites from work and labour, but crucial sites of symbolic, political and economic formation.20 Riesman’s subsequent focus on cocktail parties extended this concern with the permeability of the boundaries demarcating work, politics and sociability, but perhaps his team’s most significant discovery was the sheer difficulty they encountered in making observations.21 They found that they could not take recording equipment to parties, because, unsurprisingly, it killed the vibe. If people realised that they were the subjects of study mid-​soirée, they became suspicious and belligerent. Conversely, although total immersion by the participant-​observer meant a more in-​depth experience, this –​equally unsurprisingly –​produced garbled, alcohol-​infused data. ‘Again and again’, Riesman recalled, ‘we were reminded that sociability is generally viewed as a private affair, with observation and study not welcome’.22 Sociability, it transpired, was not a stable object of examination, but tantalisingly opaque, slippery and difficult to pin down. Riesman’s investigation of the cocktail party as a social ritual reflects the wider fascination with face-​to-​face communication during the late 1950s and the 1960s, exemplified by Erving Goffman’s sociological writings. Riesman approached cocktail gatherings as precisely the kind of theatrically staged everyday environment that Goffman studied, involving bodily as much as verbal expression.23 In Behavior in Public Places (1963), Goffman comparably attempted to identify ground rules for face-​to-​face engagement, particularly for intimate ‘copresence’, arguing that these exchanges are essentially regulatory:  ‘the rule of behavior that seems to be common to all situations and exclusive to them is the rule obliging participants to “fit in” ’.24 In a subtle but significant distinction from Goffman, Riesman suggested in The Lonely Crowd that social interaction was a question not of internalising strict codes, but rather of developing ‘the elaborate equipment needed to attend to such messages and occasionally to participate in their circulation’.25 Like Kaprow’s Six Ordinary Happenings, Minucode understood everyday interactions as relationally performative, while leaving room for the subversion of and resistance to behavioural patterns.

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In 1960, Newsweek accused Riesman of wasting public money on ‘confirming every common conception of cocktail parties, and a few exotic ones as well’, illustrating its attack with a cartoon depicting a manic host (or perhaps an over-​zealous sociologist) forcing two hapless cocktail-​toting guests into an unwilling tête-​à-​tête (Figure 2.4).26 While Minucode’s elaborate cocktail gatherings could be seen as comparably mocking the quantitative urge to reify and codify, Minujín shared Riesman’s fascination with the unwritten rules of sociability, and the communicative impasses disrupting relations between subjects. Like Riesman, the artist understood that cocktail parties were a product of social change, marking a new, freer mode of communication than staid formal dinners, but nonetheless necessitating careful navigation. Responding to Newsweek, Riesman argued that sociability was so multifaceted it demanded a sophisticated, interdisciplinary approach beyond the scope of his initiative: ‘one needs a psychology that is concerned with social character in its stratified and historical forms, an anthropology that is likewise historical, a sociology that is clinical in psychological outlook and in some of its methods, and a social and intellectual history not confined to elites’.27 For all Minucode’s fizz and flair, it took sociability just as seriously, approaching it as a cultural, economic, psychological and political phenomenon. Minujín’s uneven social and professional experiences as she moved between Argentina and the USA underscored the importance of socialisation. Minujín quickly established connections with American artists, including Kaprow and Carolee Schneemann. A  February 1968 newsletter for New York University’s School of Continuing Education includes a group shot of ‘The Faculty of Adventures in New Media’, featuring Tony Conrad, La Monte Young, Steve Paxton, Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman. To the far right sits Minujín, holding her own among a group of predominantly male experimental practitioners (the other women are the light artist Marian Zazeela, and Chryssa) at the forefront of media art (Figure 2.5). Yet her first days and weeks in the city were challenging. Writing to the French critic Pierre Restany, Minujín feared that she would be dismissed as an ‘under-​developed South American’.28 Restany responded: New York is a hard city, especially for foreigners, and there is a subtle combination of social standing, artistic politics, self-​interested friendships, and scheming. There is also a lack of interest on the part of galleries, dealers and from nationalist critics, for all that is done outside of the US cultural scene, specifically New  York. The Parisian artists in New  York have disappointed you:  alas … they are concerned above all with their own careers, and their position is rather delicate.29

Minujín felt unable to capitalise on her Parisian connections, while Restany conjures a dispiriting vista of international artists jostling for position in an

Marta Minujín’s sociability experiments

‘Cocktail Parties –​Are Hosts People?’ Newsweek 55, no. 18 (2 May 1960): 25.

uncaring city. A  hoped-​for show at Leo Castelli failed to materialise, and although Minujín displayed her 1965 environment El batacazo (which roughly translates as ‘the long shot’) at the Bianchini Gallery in 1966, the exhibit closed early after the live rabbits it featured died.30 In light of this uneasy acclimatisation, Minucode emerges as a performance of transnational infiltration, through which the artist anticipated and turned back the exclusionary gazes of established social and professional groups.31 As such, Minucode went further than the Sociability Project in its clear-​ sighted fixation on the cocktail party as a central locus for the reproduction

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2.5 ‘Stars at Washington Square’, Continuing Education, newsletter of the School of Continuing Education, New York University (February 1968): 1.

of social and economic privilege. Minujín’s use of the questionnaire format to target self-​selecting participants slyly undercut the rhetoric of accessibility that surrounded early manifestations of the Happening. While Kaprow might have claimed that the Happening marked the advent of an open, democratic

Marta Minujín’s sociability experiments

art form, Minujín demonstrated that people’s presence at such performances resulted directly from their cultural status.32 Minucode’s recruitment survey exposed how the act of joining a Happening was informed by access to the mass media and familiarity with certain messages and protocols, and was not due to any innate egalitarianism.33 The work offered a laboratorial testing of social control, whereby the interactions of four social groups were surveilled and then reproduced. But the resulting performance also crucially introduced critical distance between its participants and this process, questioning the imposition of group conformity. Imports and exports: sociology in Argentina As well as responding to developments in US social science, Minujín’s work was fundamentally shaped by the rise of sociology and the mass media in Argentina during the 1960s. These areas intersected in the study and facilitation of communication, and informed Minujín’s innovation of the Happening into a device for analysing sociability. The Happening was treated in Argentina as a US import. Although critics and artists deliberated over Spanish equivalents for the word, such as ‘suceso’ and ‘acontecimiento’, ‘Happening’ stuck.34 While the press embraced the term, and figures such as Minujín deployed it strategically, practitioners also investigated the ‘Happening’ as a prefabricated, imperialist cultural product, as seen in the Acerca (de): ‘Happenings’ project discussed in the introduction.35 This attitude can be linked to the growing preponderance of a sociological mind-​set in Argentina, which was itself linked to US-​dominated developmentalist drives. Following the ousting and exile of the autocratic Juan Domingo Perón in 1955, Argentina entered a period of relative, albeit precarious, economic development. Between 1958 and 1962, Arturo Frondizi’s civil government implemented labour reforms to stimulate the economy, and from 1963 to 1966 his successor Arturo Illia continued to encourage foreign investment.36 This resulted in increased access to consumer goods, development of the mass media, and prosperity for sections of the middle and upper classes.37 The Revolución Libertadora following Perón’s ouster reopened sectors that had been closed to anti-​Peronists, leading to rapid change, particularly in the universities, where embrace of the social sciences exemplified a new technocratic attitude. Giunta has incisively demonstrated how the cultural sphere was deeply involved in these developmentalist energies.38 An enhanced arts infrastructure emerged, with funding largely provided by Argentine and US private foundations. One of the key players in this rapidly evolving landscape was the Torcuato Di Tella Institute and its arts centres, where Minujín presented multiple works. The Di Tella family established the Institute in 1958 using the fortune generated by their company SIAM (Sociedad Industrial Americana

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de Maquinarias), which manufactured domestic appliances and cars.39 From 1963 until the decade’s end, a building on the lively Florida Street in the ‘microcenter’ of Buenos Aires housed the Institute’s art centres.40 Under Jorge Romero Brest’s directorship, the Centro de Artes Visuales (Centre for Visual Arts; CAV) organised exhibitions, and national and international prizes, as well as Happenings, lectures and debates.41 The social sciences played an equally key role in this modernising cultural activity. In his study of Gino Germani, one of the most influential sociologists in Argentina, Alejandro Blanco relates how sociology had an institutional presence in the country from 1940 when an Institute for Sociology was established in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA).42 It was not, however, until the late 1950s, after Germani inaugurated an official sociology department at UBA and launched a degree programme, that the discipline gained prominence. In 1960 new course enrolments numbered 483 students: by 1966 this had reached 533, and by 1970 1,032.43 This popularity was accompanied by the appearance of sociology degrees at other universities, and of privately funded research organisations seeking to examine contemporary society, including the Di Tella’s own Centro de Investigaciones Sociales (Centre for Social Studies; CIS).44 Influenced by Germani, the CIS opened in 1963, and by 1966 had grown to employ eleven investigators and seven assistants.45 These new sociological models were data-​driven and evidence-​based, but also intimately intertwined with psychoanalysis, psychology, structuralism and semiotics.46 As Mariano Ben Plotkin notes in his history of psychoanalysis in Argentina, students of these subjects saw themselves as ‘agents’ of ‘modernization’.47 Their commitment to sociology and psychology, together with the more established discourse of psychoanalysis, which had enjoyed huge influence in Argentina since the 1920s, provided them with tools to analyse rapid sociocultural change, and in turn affirmed their scientism.48 The Di Tella’s arts and social science centres were located in different parts of Buenos Aires, with the latter situated on Virrey del Pino in the Belgrano neighbourhood. Yet  although there were no direct collaborations, both constituted complementary expressions of the Di Tella’s ethos.49 There were also points of informal contact through figures such as Eliseo Verón, the sociologist who subjected Minujín’s Simultaneidad en simultaneidad to sustained analysis, and Masotta himself.50 As the 1960s progressed, Masotta shifted ‘from a domesticated Sartrean position’ to an interest in Lacanian psychoanalysis and semiotics, which he lectured on at the CIS.51 Masotta’s movement between these institutions exemplifies what Ana Longoni and Mariano Mestman describe as the fluid disciplinary boundaries that characterised the Buenos Aires art scene, resulting in works that were ‘difficult to classify, “unsettling” for existing canons within the artistic and cultural field’.52 This disciplinary heterogeneity was embodied by the emergence of a new type of public persona: that of the

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investigator engaged with the production of reports and collaborative studies, which quickly usurped that of the isolated university professor in the popular imagination.53 It is precisely this sociological persona that we see invoked in a number of Argentine art projects during this period, notably Simultaneidad en simultaneidad. For Luis Camnitzer, Simultaneidad en simultaneidad constituted a ‘nonpolitical experiment’, which lacked the ideological conceptualism that he and scholars including Mari Carmen Ramírez identify as a central strand of Latin American artistic practice during this period.54 Yet while Minujín’s 1966 Happening could be read as an embrace of globalising media spectacle and technocratic scientism, it also treated the mediatised image as a catalyst for change, and sought to interrogate as well as celebrate the effects of technology on communication. The work was particularly sensitive to the importance of sociability in the acquisition of cultural capital, offering a granular study of its participants, who formed a representative sampling of the audiences that regularly gathered at the Di Tella.55 The Invasión instantánea, meanwhile, surveyed media habits and conspicuous consumption –​notably ownership of a television or radio –​among the middle and upper classes.56 Simultaneidad en simultaneidad offered a snapshot of the economic and cultural situation in Argentina during the mid-​1960s, revealing what Laura Podalsky describes as the ‘new urban sensibility’ that ‘fostered the notion of Buenos Aires as a modern(izing) metropolis  –​a vision resonant with … developmentalist discourses emerging at the time’.57 In an important critique of the relationship among business, corporate sponsorship, artistic production and modernisation in Argentina, Néstor García Canclini notes that the power wielded by organisations such as the Di Tella meant that they could ‘plan expensive cultural activities with maximum impact, control the circuits through which they were communicated, and manipulate both the critics and, to a lesser extent, the way in which different groups interpreted them’.58 Simultaneidad en simultaneidad studied this sensibility in action, isolating a brief moment in the evolution of a social grouping –​the elite cultural intelligentsia of Buenos Aires –​and, by subjecting it to sustained investigation from within, exposed its formation and operation. Verón highlighted this aspect in his semiological deconstruction of the work. He argued that Minujín’s Happening was concerned with the process of cultivating and reproducing cultural capital, ‘whereby elite groups generate the reference of their own cultural enclosure’.59 This is corroborated by contemporary responses, with one journalist describing how, on receiving an invitation to Simultaneidad en simultaneidad, a shiver ran down his spine at the prospect of finally being included among the ‘initiates’.60 A shrewd media operator, Minujín designed a work that would attract media coverage in magazines such as Primera plana, in order to observe the interlacing patterns of sociability, influence and

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celebrity that consolidate cultural hegemony. Verón’s use of the word ‘enclosure’ is striking. While it most immediately evokes the exclusivity of the social circle that Minujín brought into focus through her performance, it also implies the presence of constraints and restrictions impeding their interaction.61 At this point, television in Latin America mainly consisted of a few private providers and, according to Hernán Galperin, ‘combined the American model of commercial TV with the authoritarian character of politics in the region’.62 Minujín’s intervention into Argentina’s media circuits was hard-​won, with few stations willing to collaborate on the project.63 The presence of her voice, name and face on the screens in the Di Tella Institute and across Buenos Aires was brief, but it did mark a divergence from business as usual, and a concerted attempt to reroute communications media to alternative, if privileged, ends.64 Despite Camnitzer’s verdict, Simultaneidad en simultaneidad’s sociological scrutiny of cultural composition and interpersonal interaction does have political implications. Minujín’s Happening occurred four months after Onganía’s military coup on 28 June 1966.65 Argentina entered a phase of cultural conservatism under the auspices of the so-called Revolución Argentina, including an attack against students and academics on 29 July at UBA during the Night of the Long Batons.66 In this increasingly volatile environment, Minujín’s promotion of a distinctly transnational countercultural identity, with her gold boiler suit and allusions to Marshall McLuhan, assumes an oppositional quality.67 The Happening’s rejection of geographic borders forms a stark contrast to the military’s attempts to tighten the boundaries and ideology of the Argentine nation state. Simultaneidad en simultaneidad’s structuralist analysis of the social system that produced it replicated the modernising embrace of sociology in Argentina, but at the same time destabilised its effects through recourse to countercultural techno-​utopian connectivity.68 At the world’s fair: Cold War communication These aspects of Minujín’s works become particularly apparent when Minucode and Simultaneidad en simultaneidad are considered in relation to Circuit (Super Heterodyne), Minujín’s third major sociological Happening of the 1960s.69 Just as Minucode responded to the sociocultural mélange of celebrity, power and influence in New York, Circuit (Super Heterodyne) registered the geopolitical power play of Expo ’67, which took place in Montreal, its pavilions spilling through the recently regenerated docklands and across two islands in the St Lawrence River. Minujín’s performance was supported by the Youth Pavilion (Pavillon de la Jeunesse) and took place in part in a studio at George Williams University on 28 April, the opening day of the Expo.70 Like Simultaneidad en simultaneidad and Minucode, Circuit (Super Heterodyne) consisted of interconnected stages that established an informational

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feedback loop, using a survey in the Montreal press to corral participants. Replies were reportedly sorted using an IBM computer, underlining the enterprise’s bureaucratic leanings.71 The questionnaire asked people to specify their height, weight, and hair-​and eye-​colour, as well as the size of their mouths. Options were limited:  they could select ‘fat’, ‘medium’ or ‘thin’ for body shape, and there were only three possibilities for dress style: ‘mod’, ‘ivy league’ and ‘beatnik’. Minujín seemed less interested in seriously sampling her audience than in prompting them toward preordained categories. The survey’s coercive qualities became pronounced with questions probing respondents’ psychological states, requiring them to identify their mood  –​‘anxious’, ‘normal’ or ‘passive’ –​and asking them whether they suffered from ‘nervous tics’, establishing a highly normative, disciplinary framework for identity.72 Similar tensions inform other contemporaneous artistic deployments of the survey. For Gallery Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile at the Howard Wise Gallery in 1969, Hans Haacke invited visitors to mark a map of New York with their birthplace and home address. This generated a social cartography of the city that illuminated the links between cultural and economic capital, in a way that echoes Minucode. Like Minujín, Haacke used sociological methods to test performative behaviour. For his 1970 MoMA Poll during Kynaston McShine’s Information exhibition, the artist famously canvassed the museum-​ going public’s opinion about Vietnam, posing the question:  ‘Would the fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon’s Indochina policy be a reason for you not to vote for him in November?’73 Photographs of the MoMA Poll show ‘yes’ and ‘no’ ballots mounting up inside clear Plexiglas boxes, so that rather than offering an unbiased, impartial test, this apparent transparency engineered a situation in which participants might be swayed by prevailing opinion.74 This feedback circuit revealed what respondents presumed they should think, as much as reflecting their actual views. Such uses of the survey apparently proffer democratic choice, but ultimately stage how people might be steered toward positions and actions.75 For the ‘Super Heterodyne’ section in the Youth Pavilion, Minujín planned to select respondents according to the characteristics they had self-​identified and winnow them into groups:  ‘all the members of the same group must possess similar characteristics like, for example, a tall height, a reduced weight, lots of nervous tics, etc.’76 Meanwhile, another group of people were launched into the ‘heart of a technological situation’ at George Williams University, the space filled with televisions glowing in the darkness like illuminated aquariums (Figure 2.6).77 As attendees watched a prerecorded broadcast by Radio-​ Canada, cameras filmed and simultaneously transmitted their reactions onto a screen on the wall and onto other monitors. Popular and art-​house films were also projected, and photographers and interviewers circulated continuously throughout the room (Figure  2.7) while Minujín provided an audio

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2.6 Marta Minujín, Circuit (Super Heterodyne), April 1967, environment supported by the Youth Pavilion/​George Williams University, Expo ’67, Montreal.

2.7 Marta Minujín, Circuit (Super Heterodyne), April 1967, environment supported by the Youth Pavilion/​George Williams University, Expo ’67, Montreal.

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commentary. By each television, Minujín placed a mirror to underscore the participants’ entrapment within a closed media circuit. Replicating the formula established in Simultaneidad en simultaneidad, Minujín subjected participants to media ‘invasions’.78 Once again, the event’s culmination arguably undid the regulatory dynamic of data collection, bombarding participants with sounds and images in an immersive, disorienting sensory experience. Yet of Minujín’s three sociological Happenings, Circuit (Super Heterodyne) in particular raises the question as to whether Minujín exposed, analysed and thereby contested the policing of appearance and behaviour at individual and collective levels, or whether she reiterated hierarchised and divisive understandings of identity. The survey in Circuit (Super Heterodyne) has parallels with Goffman’s 1963 study Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, especially in its fixation on nervous tics as markers of difference. Of all Goffman’s texts, Stigma is his most deterministic. It draws a clear line between an assumed ‘we’ aligned with white, male, heteronormativity ‘who do not depart negatively from … particular expectations’ and are designated ‘the normals’ (italics in original), and people who are othered according to three types of stigma: ‘first there are abominations of the body –​the various physical deformities. Next there are blemishes of individual character … Finally there are the tribal stigma [sic] of race, nation, and religion.’79 Goffman may have been attempting to challenge the stigmas operating in US society, but the assumptions underpinning his account expose sociology’s tendency during the 1960s to inscribe systematic differences and impose totalising conclusions, elements that contributed to its deployment in organisational and managerial control. Circuit (Super Heterodyne) had an undeniably cruel streak, but its study of interpersonal communication must be read in the context of Expo ’67. In keeping with Minujín’s other sociological performances, it manifested an interest in how soft power governed conduct and interaction. Daniel R. Quiles persuasively identifies a strand of institutional critique in Minujín’s practice, noting the CIAR’s significance as a location for Minucode in light of its Rockefeller Foundation funding.80 Quiles suggests that the Happening ‘contains a subtext of institutional critique in its mimicry of the center’s ideology and outreach’, and specifically that Tony Martin’s colourful light show parodied the ‘color-​and light-​based abstraction’ promoted by the CIAR, exemplified by the exhibition Más allá de la geometría: Extensión del lenguaje artístico-​visual en nuestros días (Beyond Geometry: An Extension of Visual-​Artistic Language in Our Time), which transferred there from the Di Tella in 1968.81 Institutional critique and site-​specificity comparably inform Circuit (Super Heterodyne), which undertook a study of mass-​media communication at an epicentre of cultural brinkmanship. The theme of Expo ’67 was ‘Man and His World’, a formulation that grounded the Expo in the longer histories of colonialism, imperialism, exploitation and appropriation inherent in the very concept of the ‘World’s

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Fair’, even as the vocabulary of systems and circuitry that pervaded many of the contributions worked against the event’s organisation into national pavilions.82 The Israeli-Canadian architect Moshe Safdie described his iconic Habitat development of modular housing along the Montreal waterfront as ‘a total environment … a complete system rather than just a building’.83 The US pavilion, an architectural scene-​stealer designed by R. Buckminster Fuller, consisted of a gigantic, glittering geodesic dome (Figure  2.8). Transparent acrylic panels enabled viewers outside to glimpse the treasures within. A series of escalators, including the longest built to date, linked exhibition platforms showcasing relics from America’s ascendency in the space race against the USSR. These were juxtaposed with large-​scale canvases by Pop artists such as Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist, hung dramatically from the dome’s structure for the exhibition American Painting Now. As Lisa Tickner summarises, the US pavilion ‘had no qualms about embracing contemporary art, along with the Apollo space program, as an ideological weapon in the Cold War’.84 The Cambridge Seven Associates architectural firm, which designed the pavilion’s interior, cited McLuhan as a crucial influence.85 The resulting bravura display underscored that an engagement with the countercultural rhetoric espoused by McLuhan was by no means incompatible with Cold War ideology.86 Circuit (Super Heterodyne) was similarly shaped by McLuhan’s promotion of interconnectivity, and his conviction that ‘in this electric age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving

2.8 Shunk-​Kender, the US and USSR pavilions at Expo ’67, Montreal, 1967.

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toward the technological extension of consciousness’.87 This vision of the nervous system extended into a global reach through technology relied heavily on Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic concept of the feedback mechanism, as the proclamations that pepper Understanding Media  –​such as ‘by continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms’ –​ demonstrate.88 Minujín’s attempt to create a media loop in Circuit (Super Heterodyne), as in Minucode and Simultaneidad en simultaneidad, could be seen as a continuation of the Expo’s humanist techno-​futurism.89 Yet while Circuit (Super Heterodyne) may have imbibed McLuhan’s precepts, it also manifested some of the more limited, compromised aspects of cybernetic and systems thinking. It exemplified how the counterculture’s embrace of collaborative communication was not always easily extricable from the very processes and institutions it putatively reviled. The sociological aspects of Minujín’s work are especially revealing in this respect, highlighting the ease with which the use of mass-​media communications for research and observation might shore up established centres of power. This is perhaps most apparent in the use of the survey, which, as in Minucode, revealed the divisions and exclusions that underpinned the Expo’s universalising ‘Man and His World’ theme. A gatekeeping apparatus, the survey indicates how Circuit (Super Heterodyne) was alive to the way in which countercultural approaches to, and engagements with, technology were indebted to those systems, and could be co-​opted by them. In his study of the relationship between the counterculture and cybernetics, Fred Turner charts how ‘the countercultural dream of transcendence signaled a move toward the embrace of knowledge and collaborative styles of knowledge work that had emerged at the heart of mainstream American research and industrial culture during World War II’.90 The study of communication in the USA was deeply embedded in Cold War politics, with anthropologists and sociologists turning to the study of nonverbal exchange during the 1950s within the paranoid atmosphere of McCarthyism and anticommunism.91 Sociology and psychology were also deeply imbricated in US interference in Latin American politics. Perhaps the most infamous example of this occurred in 1965 with Project Camelot, commissioned by the US Department of Defense and envisaged by some as the sociological ‘equivalent of the Manhattan Project’.92 It ended in ignominy, before it really began, when plans for the initiative were inadvertently discovered in Chile, causing international fallout. In an appositely aggressive fashion, Circuit (Super Heterodyne) staged how its participants’ physical and even psychological attributes could be translated into cultural capital, and by extension economic and military bargaining chips. The Youth Pavilion nonetheless offered a space where countercultural, cross-​ border alternatives to geopolitical manoeuvrings could be tested. Diverging from the market orthodoxy and cultural politicking of the national pavilions, its programming mixed experimental performances by artists such

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as Minujín and Carolee Schneemann with sets from the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. Schneemann presented Night Crawlers (Rampants de la nuit) at the Pavilion in September 1967.93 The work began with Schneemann and Mitsou Naslednikov clambering over the audience to reach the central space, handing out cellophane-​wrapped sweets as they did so.94 Schneemann then projected her film Red News (1964) onto a screen. As violent footage of a speedway race, car-​crashes and war flared across it, Scheemann and Naslednikov attempted to obliterate the images using brushes laden with red paint, in an impossible game of cat-​and-​mouse. James Tenney entered in a Plymouth station wagon, from which they proceeded to extricate skeins of pink polyurethane foam. Viet-​Flakes (1965), an explicitly antiwar work made by filming atrocity photographs from Vietnam, flickered into life; Schneemann and Tenney climbed on top of the car and began a series of contact exchanges as the images washed over them.95 When Viet-​ Flakes ended, Schneemann, Tenney and Naslednikov started carrying people into the performance space, inviting them to manipulate the detritus littered across the stage. Legs, heads and arms poked out from wads of crumpled paper and foam. The latter’s honeycombed texture, reminiscent of cells, pores and suckers, lent the ensuing formations a biomorphic aspect, recombining individual bodies into fantastical hybrids, presenting images of simultaneous breakdown and organic renewal (Figure 2.9). ‘Night crawler’ is a colloquial term used by anglers for live worms. In her performance notes, Schneemann fancifully imagined how a fish from one side of the US–​Canada border might be caught on the other, reflecting that her title referenced the experience of displacement, as well as the disillusionment of prolonged protest against the Vietnam War.96 The audience dispersed material from her performance across the site, ignoring boundaries and barriers, so that the pink foam spread like a countercultural virus. Some audience members stayed through the night, and Schneemann was greeted the next morning by ‘lumps of the pink foam high on a flag pole, floating in a moat, stuffed in corners of the Media pavilion, circling the shoulders of a monumental female statue from Poland’.97 In contrast to the systems rhetoric elsewhere at the Expo, Schneemann’s model of organic interrelation recognised difference and proceeded from an ethics of networked relationality, whereby the performers could ‘assume our commonality’ with the ‘multi-​national audience’.98 Night Crawlers and Circuit (Super Heterodyne) shared elements of cross-​border utopianism, while retaining a critical edge in their deployment of media communications. Celluloid subjects Although Minujín responded to the embrace of sociology and psychology in Latin America and the USA, she also complicated these discourses.

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Carolee Schneemann, Night Crawlers (Rampants de la nuit), 1967, performance at the Youth Pavilion, Expo ’67, Montreal. Photograph by Shunk-​Kender.

Simultaneidad en simultaneidad, Circuit (Super Heterodyne) and Minucode raise questions as to precisely the kind of subject envisaged by Minujín’s experiments with sociability, and the role of communication in its construction. This was especially evident in Minucode, which exemplifies how the artist’s investigation of communication fostered an understanding of the subject as a celluloid entity. By this I do not mean necessarily a simulacral

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reduction of the subject, but rather one formed through and in mediation, their identity rendered mutable and contingent. While the screening session at the CIAR, and those that had preceded it at the Di Tella and Expo ’67, seemingly fostered reflexive sociological scrutiny among attendees, the possibility for this was challenged by the opacity of the filmic medium. David Joselit elaborates video feedback’s disorientating psychological impact, describing how it ‘mingles alienation with intimacy’.99 Although Minucode occurred before the instant feedback of the portable video camera became widely available, Minujín created a similar structure using film. Film technology, however, meant that the delay between recording and transmission, and the combination of alienation and intimacy, became acute. Far from the cameras chronicling the scene ‘impartially and objectively from both sides of the room’, as the press release rather blandly put it, when their collated footage was shown during the second part of the Happening, viewers were plunged into a destabilising experience of recognition and dissociation.100 Audiences were invited to see themselves in the footage, but this encounter threatened to result in estrangement as much as pragmatic self-​fashioning. The potential for this was indicated by an ‘eerie, unplanned’ phenomenon that emerged during the screening session, recounted in the New Yorker: ‘whenever someone stepped inadvertently in front of a projector, an ominous black silhouette –​alien yet vaguely familiar –​seemed to pass among the glittering two-​dimensional guests, who went right on drinking and talking and staring at each other’.101 In one photograph, a luminous projection of indistinct bodily forms captured mid-​movement glows against the walls. On the left, two viewers pass before the projector, their silhouettes disrupting the tableau’s coherence (Figure  2.10). The shadows thrown by physically present bodies confront the indexical quality of film, but neither attains supremacy. Instead, both appear as traces of an absent, alienated presence. Minucode, rather than revealing the viewers to themselves, risked casting them into a temporally and physically unstable zone of elusive projections and shadow play.102 However, the resulting celluloid sociology was by far from uninterested in social interaction, although the celluloid support did work against the sociological grain. Minucode might be said to have turned sociology against itself, exposing its reifying ambitions and capacity for deterministic application. It invoked sociological processes of observation and objectification in order to propose models of subjectivity that embraced dissolution and collectivity, as opposed to regimented self-​performance. This aspect can be traced to Martin’s light environment, conceived of as ‘another media extension of the sending and receiving principle’ of the Happening.103 Participants who entered this room made the transition from ‘recorded object’ to ‘communicated object’, resulting in ‘a picture by something as opposed to a picture of something’.104 Visitors to Martin’s Game Room of the

Marta Minujín’s sociability experiments

Marta Minujín, Minucode, 1968, screening session at the Center for Inter-​American Relations, New York City.

same year at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York chose an area to stand in, which catalysed a series of events (Figure  2.11). In this expanded version of the Minucode scenario, Martin sought to ‘enable the viewer to create his own environment … One that expresses his own personality. In playing the game, people act and react together to shape the room. They do this by their conscious or subconscious choices, which activate endless combinations of light images and electronic sound.’105 Documentation of Martin’s light environment for Minujín conveys its psychedelic atmosphere, and suggests its correspondence with the situation created during the final screening. A woman and man look down over the beds of the projectors, perhaps experimentally moving sections of coloured shapes around (Figure  2.12). While the woman’s head remains intact, the combination of projections and light sources through the effects of double exposure makes it look as if a luminous dagger has bisected the man’s. His outline merges with that of a second person nearby, their contours fusing like overlapping watermarks. The silhouette of yet another participant can be discerned inside the aura of light that has invaded the man’s body, occupying the space where his forehead should be. It is difficult to differentiate bodies from projection, physicality from shadow, resulting in an image that presents the physical and psychological borders of individual identity in a state of breakdown. Minucode undercut the deterministic potential of sociology by providing a zone for attendees where their behaviour might become

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2.11 Tony Martin, poster for Game Room and ‘Invironment’, 1968, Howard Wise Gallery, New York City, installation consisting of 8 modified carousel projectors, 4 custom projectors, 680 hand-​made slides, viewer-​activated retro-​reflective photocell projection system and sound system.

less predictable, and where they could shape an alternative environment rather than being merely scrutinised. While Quiles perceptively relates the light show element of Minucode to institutional critique, it is equally important to note that it connects the Happening to kinetic and light art, of the kind exhibited by the Howard Wise Gallery, which showed works by Otto Piene, Group Zero and Julio Le Parc,

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Marta Minujín, Minucode, 1968, Tony Martin’s light environment, Center for Inter-​ American Relations, New York City.

as well as Martin’s Game Room and Minujín’s overtly ‘hippie’ Minuphone.106 Martin’s light show links Minucode to wider countercultural experiments in visual culture, such as the Joshua Light Show, which accompanied concerts at the Fillmore East in New York during the mid-​to-​late 1960s, projecting the swirling effects of coloured oil in water onto screens to create a sensory, synesthetic experience.107 Comparably, artist groups such as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI) and USCO (Us Company or Company of Us), whose visions of technological connectivity were closely related to McLuhan’s ideas, used light-​and sound-​technologies to disorientate their audiences and wrench them from everyday patterns.108 For all their mimicry of contained sociological experiments, Minujín’s Happenings of 1966–​68 had the potential to create similar moments of disorientation, often confusing and overwhelming their viewers, as contemporary press reports attest.109 This replicates the way in which the protocols of psychological and sociological study were coming under significant pressure from countercultural ideas.110 After ingesting a hallucinogenic mushroom during the summer of 1960 while in Mexico, the psychologist Timothy Leary returned to his job in the Harvard Psychology Department determined to study the effects of psilocybin, convinced of its revolutionary potential to change human behaviour.111 Inevitably, the psychological and sociological trappings of the Harvard Psilocybin Project, which initially included filling out personality questionnaires before and after ingesting the drug, rapidly fell

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away, leading to consternation among Department of Social Relations staff, and Leary’s ultimate expulsion from the university.112 Leary believed that it was only through the use of hallucinogens such as psilocybin and later LSD that humans could realise their full communicative potential as a ‘divine receiving station’ and ‘sacred communications satellite’.113 The Politics of Ecstasy (1968), as well as a celebration of psychotropic substances, is also an attack on traditional psychology, neurology and psychiatry, which Leary accused of confused discourse and repressive methods. The solution he advocated, in the face of the failure by established models to assess psychological experience, was for each individual to act as their own analytical interlocutor: ‘Everyone must become his own Einstein, his own Darwin … his own Pavlov, his own Freud, his own anaesthesiologist.’114 The sociological machinery set in motion during Simultaneidad en simultaneidad, Circuit (Super Heterodyne) and Minucode encouraged people to interact differently, to throw off established patterns of socialisation and embrace collectivity in ways that operated in dialogue with countercultural explorations of inner consciousness. The psychedelic allusions of Minujín’s sociological Happenings go beyond aesthetics. They push the Happening into a form of alternative social-​ psychological experiment that paralleled the expanded consciousness of psychedelic experience.115 Simultaneidad en simultaneidad, Circuit (Super Heterodyne) and Minucode retained a sense of critical distance and performativity that enabled these processes to be subjected to scrutiny, demonstrated by the way in which Martin’s light-​and-​collage environment sat within Minucode like a prepackaged, eminently consumable countercultural space. Toward the end of the 1960s, Minujín’s relationship with the counterculture became particularly pronounced.116 At the same time, however, Minujín’s sociological Happenings, closely attuned as they were to the effects of the mass media, acknowledged the rapid commodification of the counterculture, and showed how interactions designed to be ‘outside’ society could become bound up in the accumulation of cultural influence.117 Simultaneidad en simultaneidad, Circuit (Super Heterodyne) and Minucode vividly manifested the paradox at the heart of the countercultural take-​up of cybernetic thinking: that any attempt to break out of a given system is formed and modulated by that system’s feedback loops. Visionary sociology Minujín would most explicitly use the Happening to test countercultural models of communication in a series of performances made in New  York and Washington, DC between 1972 and 1973. These works, as Quiles has observed, are ‘rarely discussed’, even though they reflect the artist’s longstanding interests in the competing power dynamics within collectivity.118 What little critical commentary they have attracted takes a bemused,

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dismissive tone. Claire Bishop finds Minujín’s combination of ‘glitzy pop chic and allusions to a political framework of repression’ in her 1973 performance Kidnappening distinctly unpalatable, concluding that these later works are expressive of little more than the artist’s ‘self-​exploitation for a US audience’.119 Bishop’s response is indicative of the unease that, I would like to argue, Kidnappening and related performances  –​Interpenning (1972), presented in Washington, DC and New York; 200 Mattresses (The Soft Gallery) (1973), an installation in Washington, DC; and Nicappening (1973) in New York –​knowingly played with. Ostensibly, these performances, with their emphasis on dance and sensory participation, seem to collapse the mediated connectivity of Minujín’s earlier works, and might as such correspond with critiques of technology’s domination and coercion by commentators such as Herbert Marcuse.120 Yet these Happenings remain connected to Minujín’s concern with the relationships among sociability, cultural capital, economics and political agency. Moreover, they actualise the competing debates about the political possibilities of the counterculture, pointing to the limits of both liberatory and conformist readings alike. Like Minucode and Circuit (Super Heterodyne), Interpenning and Kidnappening occupied a key locus of soft diplomacy, presented during the New York Museum of Modern Art’s Summergarden programme in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, sponsored by Exxon Mobil. A photograph from the MoMA performance of Interpenning captures the echo between the geometric pose of a dancer mid-​movement, and the brushed stainless-​ steel planes of David Smith’s Cubi X (1963) (Figure  2.13). Although part of an official, corporately sponsored event funded by a predatory US oil giant, this gesture bears comparison with Yayoi Kusama’s impromptu naked 1969 Happening in the Sculpture Garden’s pond.121 Rather than self-​exploitation or unthinking institutional compromise, the contrast in the Interpenning photograph between the embodied execution of a transient work by an Argentine artist and the solid sculpture by a member of the US artistic establishment encapsulates the ways in which Interpenning and Kidnappening addressed the unequal geographic, economic and cultural power imbalances that Minujín navigated in Minucode and Circuit (Super Heterodyne). For Interpenning, Minujín worked with a group of participants that she christened ‘interpenactors’, teaching them stylised movements based on attitudes gleaned from ‘fashion magazines’ and chants amassed from text snippets and quotations.122 A web of green Scotch Tape demarcated the dancers’ routes across the MoMA Sculpture Garden. Dressed in blue and green, they walked among the audience, who began the event seated cross-​legged on the floor. Other performers wearing silver guided them through this maze with lights as dusk settled, before the two groups encouraged the audience to stand up and join in collective movement. Like Minucode, the raw material used

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2.13 Marta Minujín, Interpenning, August 1972, Happening in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, Museum of Modern Art, New York City, as part of the Summergarden programme, with technical assistance from Gary Glover and featuring ‘invisible architecture’ by Juan Downey.

by Interpenning consisted of ‘people interacting’ in various scenarios, which Minujín listed as ‘art presentations, like this art opening –​or; waiting situations like airports or railroad stations or theater intermissions’, fused with actions taken from the didactic poses propagated by the mass media.123 By encouraging the audience to move differently, Interpenning aspired to ‘break the patterns and rules of an existing social situation and to create new patterns of interaction in which people participate more actively and more consciously’.124 In Minujín’s earlier work this intent was latent, expressed in her desire that participants watch and learn from their behaviour. By the early 1970s the artist was much more expressly concerned with elaborating alternative modes of social communication, rather than reiterating established protocols. This aspect of Minujín’s work can be traced back to her earliest Happenings, notably Suceso plástico (Plastic Event) of 1965. Discussing this violent, controversial performance in Uruguay, during which Minujín invited participants to an athletics stadium in Montevideo and pelted them with lettuces and live chickens from a helicopter, the artist asserted that the Happening could

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‘stimulate an imagination which is generally deadened by slogans, propaganda and the routine of daily work. The event happens and finishes, and afterwards the memory completes its task, distorting and recreating.’125 Minujín links the Happening’s impermanence with its capacity to interrupt the machinations of political parties and consumer capitalism, her reference to ‘slogans’ evoking both advertising and propaganda. This conceptualisation of performance’s ability to rupture quotidian atomisation correlates with Herbert Marcuse’s analysis of the counterculture as a reaction against ‘the mechanization of socially necessary but painful performances; the concentration of individual enterprises in more effective, more productive corporations; the regulation of free competition among unequally equipped economic subjects; the curtailment of prerogatives and national sovereignties which impede the international organization of resources’.126 Sven Lütticken argues that the Happenings rapidly became ‘a provider of images for spectacle in spite of the fact that they were originally aimed against the spectacular regime of commodity-​images’, but Minujín continued to align the form with the capacity to shatter, rather than automatically replicate, the repressive performativity through which disciplinary social structures concretise.127 This conviction endures in Minujín’s performances of the 1970s, which reject the ‘one dimensional thought and behaviour’ that Marcuse identified as endemic to advanced capitalism, manifested by ‘a development in scientific method:  operationalism in the physical, behaviorism in the social sciences’. ‘The common feature’ of both, he continued, ‘is a total empiricism in the treatment of concepts; their meaning is restricted to the representation of particular operations and behavior’.128 As an example of this deleterious impulse, Marcuse describes how sociology and behaviourism conspire to dissolve the link between individual problems in the workplace and the wider social structure, stripping workers’ complaints of their revolutionary potential. ‘Insofar as operational sociology and psychology have contributed to alleviating subhuman conditions’, he contends, ‘they are parts of progress, intellectual and material. But they also testify to the ambivalent rationality of progress, which is satisfying in its repressive power, and repressive in its satisfactions.’129 If Simultaneidad en simultaneidad, Circuit (Super Heterodyne) and Minucode staged the disciplinary aspects of operational sociology, then Interpenning’s rejection of normative models of sociability, its promotion of commonality and treatment of physical interaction as the gateway to new psychological states came closer to the ‘visionary sociology’ Theodore Roszak associated with the writings of Paul Goodman in his study of the counterculture.130 For Roszak, ‘visionary sociology’ blended psychology and sociology in a way that aligned with the dynamics fuelling alternative social groupings and their ‘communitarian’ expression, and the challenges to traditional models of interpersonal relation posed by the counterculture.131

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Interpenning is particularly suggestive in this respect, in that it was entered through a corridor of ‘high frequency sound waves’ and encircled by an ultrasonic barrier described as an ‘invisible architecture’, constructed by the Chilean media artist Juan Downey.132 Downey deployed a similar process the same year for Energy Fields at 112 Greene Street (Figure 2.14). Downey’s ‘energy field’ emitted a noise when the dancers –​including Carmen Beuchat, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-​Clark, Suzanne Harris and Rachel Lew  –​came too close, prompting them to adapt their movements accordingly.133 If in Energy Fields the dancers made space for, and interacted with, the electronic waves, in Interpenning the creation of a distinct zone within the Sculpture Garden manifests a countercultural desire to carve out space in existing institutional frameworks using experimental technologies.134 Downey’s videos were also presented as part of 200 Mattresses (The Soft Gallery) in 1973 at the Harold Rivkin Gallery in Washington, DC, a nest environment Minujín constructed from old mattresses in which audiences could relax while experiencing performances and media works by Schneemann, Charlotte Moorman and Ray Johnson, among others. An image of a screening shows supine bodies lounging inside their mattress den, flooded by flickering light from televisions in a vision of sequestered commonality (Figure 2.15).135 This creation of protective barriers evokes the kind of countercultural detachment celebrated by Leary as a key part of the visionary experience. The community Minujín hosted was one on the fringes of established artistic activity, while such gestures signal her investment in interpersonal connectivity rather than individualist consciousness-​exploration.136 Like Minujín’s work, Downey’s experiments in performance, video and sculpture during the late 1960s and early 1970s tested the possibilities and challenges posed by group interaction. In 1968 Downey designed a Happening entitled Communication with the New Group in Washington, DC.137 The artist established a hub at a studio on F Street NW for the evening and invited participants to come and listen to a message played on a tape. They then dispersed through the streets of the capital to a destination of their choosing, by whatever transportation desired. On arrival, participants had to contact Downey –​‘phone him, telegram him, send a carrier pigeon, anything’ –​and repeat what they could remember of the message.138 They could then return to the studio for a party; at daybreak, the messages on the tape were destroyed. Communication seemingly presents interaction as inherently entropic, fated to diminish in clarity and specificity over time and distance, through the interpolation of memory and individual interpretation. The result almost fatalistically counters Wiener’s anxious attempt to sustain communications feedback and create ‘local and temporary islands of decreasing entropy in a world in which the entropy as a whole tends to increase’.139 Yet it also contrasts the elisions of communications technologies with the in-​person conviviality of the party at

Peter Moore, performance view of Juan Downey’s Energy Fields, 21 February 1972, 112 Greene Street, New York City, choreography by Carmen Beuchat, performed by dancers including Trisha Brown, Caroline Goodden, Suzanne Harris, Rachel Lew, Barbara (Lloyd) Dilley, Gordon Matta-​Clark, Judith Padow, and Gerald Schieber.

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Marta Minujín, 200 Mattresses (The Soft Gallery), 1973, environment at Harold Rivkin Gallery, Washington, DC, in collaboration with Richard Squires.

the studio, suggesting the continued importance of copresence despite the rise of mediation. Downey became increasingly critical of US foreign policy in Latin America as he pursued his interests in cybernetics, anthropology and activism.140 Minujín’s position was far more ambivalent. This is evidenced by Nicappening (1973), for which she disrupted a Sotheby’s charity auction for the victims of a devastating earthquake in Nicaragua. The intervention  –​despite the aggressively energetic movements of the performers, and costumes noisily daubed with paint –​was, of course, planned. Proceeds from the evening were funnelled to the Pan American Foundation, which fostered public–​private partnerships in the Americas; Caterpillar and Pfizer were among its first corporate sponsors. Minujín features in the auction invitation as the evening’s light entertainment.141 For all the contrast between the messy volatility of her performers and the clean-​cut, wealthy patrons bidding for sanctioned cultural commodities (Figure 2.16), Nicappening provided soft power legitimisation for economic imperialism, bearing out Bishop’s anxiety regarding the danger of self-​exploitation in Minujín’s US performances. Yet the cultural demand to self-​exploit, and the polarisation of aesthetic debates between liberation and co-​option, might equally be understood as the cultural conditions that these later Happenings, with their deliberately

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Marta Minujín, Nicappening, 12 June 1973, Happening for the Nicaraguan Earthquake Art Relief Managuan Homeless Settlement Committee benefit, Sotheby Parke-Bernet, New York City.

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parodic titles, set firmly in their sights. This is particularly so in Kidnappening of August 1973, which reprised Interpenning’s basic structure in the same location over two nights. The writer and actor Taylor Mead, a regular at Andy Warhol’s Factory, gleefully detailed the carnivalesque atmosphere as a large mass of people imbibed ‘questionable wine in paper cups’, and clambered deliriously over the Sculpture Garden.142 There was one key difference: after the performers had danced and chanted (Figure 2.17), they ‘kidnapped’ several individuals and whisked them away to an array of self-​consciously bohemian scenes, including artists’ lofts and Max’s Kansas City restaurant. Minujín framed Kidnappening as an homage to Picasso, who had recently died, dressing her performers in brightly coloured Cubo-​ Futurist costumes and make-​ up. But the inherently disruptive act of kidnapping undercuts this respectable rationale, with performers delighting in the ‘confrontation possibilities’ occasioned.143 One drily reflected: ‘when Marta asked me to take part in the “Kidnappening” I  thought it might be a good opportunity to kidnap a rich patron’.144 Kidnappening’s frenetic quality was inadvertently enhanced when

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2.17 Marta Minujín, Kidnappening, August 1973, Happening in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, Museum of Modern Art, New York City, as part of the Summergarden programme.

the green badge system for identifying preselected people who had agreed to be ‘kidnapped’ disintegrated in the mêlée, resulting in actual kidnappings.145 A photograph captures Minujín and a collaborator reaching toward a smartly besuited man, who recoils with apprehension, relaying the performance’s combative energy (Figure 2.18). Interpenning and Kidnappening played out against a worsening political situation in Argentina. Having been a beacon of internationalism during the 1960s, the country was slipping toward the dictatorship that would engulf it from 1976 to 1983, becoming a theatre of guerrilla violence enacted by a complex network of left-​and right-​wing groups.146 The year 1973 was a turbulent one, involving a brief but transitory moment of democracy when Héctor José Cámpora was elected on the Peronist ticket, paving the way for the latter’s return from exile in Spain. On re-assuming power in September, however, Perón turned on his left-​wing supporters.147 In a taste of the violence to come, his official arrival in Argentina in July, the month before Kidnappening, resulted in a clash between political factions at Ezeiza airport that left several dead.148 Such connotations were not lost on the participants, one of whom concluded that the Happening ‘sought excitement and novelty without any real threat of danger’, noting that it referenced ‘a wave of high-​jackings … kidnappings

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Marta Minujín, Kidnappening, August 1973, Happening in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, Museum of Modern Art, New York City, as part of the Summergarden programme.

of ambassadors, [and] “state of siege” airline terminal snipers’ of the volatile early 1970s, but ultimately offered nothing more than a ‘chic mentality [that] seeks to cash in [on] such vicarious danger’.149 For a Miami tourist visiting New York, however, who only heard about the Happening two hours before it started, the ‘adventure’ occasioned ‘a splendid voyage’, during which she ‘met some good people, some creative people’.150 Kidnappening encompassed these extremes and refused to settle at either point. In that refusal, a commitment

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to an expanded form of countercultural communication can be glimpsed. The performance burlesqued both its own inevitable co-​option within institutional structures, and the media currency of countercultural resistance. Minujín’s Happenings diverge suggestively from Marcuse’s conclusions about the relationship of the counterculture with art and revolution. Marcuse maintained that art could only operate in a liberatory mode at the level of form rather than of content. Art that attempted to unite with politics jettisoned its own ‘negating power’.151 ‘The tension between art and revolution’, he maintained, ‘seems irreducible. Art itself, in practice, cannot change reality, and art cannot submit to the actual requirements of the revolution without denying itself. But art can and will draw its inspirations, and its very form, from the then-​ prevailing revolutionary movement  –​for revolution is in the substance of art.’152 For Marcuse, the Living Theater served ‘as an example of self-​defeating purpose’, and performances such as Interpenning and Kidnappening might similarly be said to treat countercultural anti-​institutionalism as mere content, thereby reducing and commodifying it.153 Such a conclusion, however, necessitates blocking out the weird, unsettling vitality of the performances; the varying reactions that they elicited from participants; and, most of all, their combination of arch self-​awareness  –​Minujín’s countercultural references were never less than knowingly mediated –​with rebarbative resistance to normative social interaction. Notes 1 Kaprow wrote to Pierre Restany: ‘I met [Jorge] Romero Brest briefly last spring and at last Marta Minujín who is here now! … We are hoping that she’ll put on something soon!’. Allan Kaprow, letter to Pierre Restany, postmarked 19 January 1966, PREST THE PER 002 (1/​8), Fonds Pierre Restany, INHA-​Collection Archives de la critique d’art, Rennes. 2 Andrea Giunta discusses Minujín’s time in Paris, in particular the dynamics of La destrucción, in Avant-​Garde, Internationalism, and Politics:  Argentine Art in the Sixties, trans. Peter Kahn (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007 [2001]), 143–​51. 3 Inés Katzenstein, ‘Marta Minujín’s Minucode:  Code and Context’, in Marta Minujín: Minucodes, ed. Gabriela Rangel (New York: Americas Society, 2015), 30–​ 41 (31). In 2010, Minujín’s influence was acknowledged in Argentina with a retrospective at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (Malba). See Victoria Noorthoorn, ed., Marta Minujín: Obras 1959–​1989 (Buenos Aires: Malba, 2010). Minujín’s career was brought back into international view by the 1998 exhibition Out of Actions; Guy Brett’s catalogue essay contextualised Minujín’s work in relation to that of her peers. Guy Brett, ‘Life Strategies:  Overview and Selection, Buenos Aires–​London–​Rio de Janeiro–​Santiago de Chile, 1960–​1980’,

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in Out of Actions:  Between Performance and the Object, 1949–​ 1979, ed. Paul Schimmel and Russell Ferguson (Los Angeles:  Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998), 197–​225. Appetite for her work continued in the following decades, featuring in Vivências (2000) at the Generali Foundation, Vienna; WACK: Art and the Feminist Revolution at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2007); The World Goes Pop at Tate Modern, London (2015); Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960–​1980 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2015); and Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–​ 1985 at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2017). 4 Giunta, Avant-​Garde, Internationalism, and Politics, 162. 5 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells:  Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London:  Verso, 2012), 118. For a valuable counter-​reading, see Nadja Rottner, ‘Marta Minujín and the Performance of Softness’, Konsthistorisk tidskrift/​Journal of Art History 83, no. 2 (2014): 110–​28. 6 Onganía’s coup ushered in a period of authoritarianism that ultimately culminated in the military dictatorship of 1976–​83. 7 Minujín created one of her most iconic works, El Partenón de libros (The Parthenon of Books), a monumental Parthenon structure made from books banned during the dictatorship, to celebrate its fall in 1983 (recreated in Kassel at Documenta 14 in 2017). This constitutes her most explicit engagement with Argentine politics, although some performances from the 1970s addressed self-​censorship and surveillance. 8 The advert appeared in Women’s Wear Daily (6 May 1968): 16; in the New  York Times (6 May 1968): 55; and twice in the Village Voice (9 May 1968): 14; and (16 May 1968): 16. It was also reportedly placed in the East Village Other, Wall Street Journal and New Republic. Each publication mapped onto the respective areas Minujín wanted to recruit from: in the Village Voice, for example, the survey competed with promotions for exhibitions and galleries. 9 ‘Environment’, New Yorker 44, no. 18 (22 June 1968): 22. 10 Marta Minujín, ‘Text of the Press Conference’, n.d., Proyectos de Obra I, 1960–70, Archivo Especial Marta Minujín, Fundación Espigas, Buenos Aires. 11 Marta Minujín, ‘Minucode:  A Multi-​Social and Media Environment Experience’, 1968, Proyectos de Obra I, 1960–​70, Archivo Especial Marta Minujín. 12 Marta Minujín, ‘1,000 Words:  Marta Minujín Talks about Minucode, 1968’, with an introduction by Daniel R.  Quiles, Artforum International 48, no.  8 (April 2010): 156–​9  (159). 13 ‘Mis experiencias en happenings–​ circuitos de ambientación–​ festivales–​ lights–​ shows–​trabajos en tecnología y sociología (siempre en si se puede decir obras de arte)’. Marta Minujín, ‘Lo que realmente me interesaría crear en el futuro …’, n.d., Proyectos de Obra I, 1960–​70, Archivo Especial Marta Minujín. 14 Grace Glueck, ‘Celluloid Sociology: Minucode, a Multimedia Offering about People at Cocktail Parties, Opens’, New York Times (30 May 1968): 22. 15 Katzenstein, ‘Marta Minujín’s Minucode’, 37.

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16 Alexander Alberro, ‘Media, Sculpture, Myth’, in A Principality of Its Own: 40 Years of Visual Arts at the Americas Society, ed. José Luis Falconi and Gabriela Rangel (New York: Americas Society, 2006), 169–​79 (165). 17 Ibid. 18 Minujín, ‘Text of the Press Conference.’ 19 David Riesman, in collaboration with Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), particularly 19–​25. The Lonely Crowd was a runaway success, selling over one million copies by 1971. Herbert J. Gans, ‘Best-​Sellers by Sociologists: An Exploratory Study’, Contemporary Sociology 26, no. 2 (March 1997): 131–​5 (133). 20 Riesman, The Lonely Crowd, 338. 21 Key findings were published in David Riesman, Robert J. Potter and Jeanne Watson, ‘The Vanishing Host’, Human Organization 19, no. 1 (1960):  17–​27; and Jeanne Watson and Robert J. Potter, ‘An Analytic Unit for the Study of Interaction’, Human Relations 15 (1962): 245–​63. 22 David Riesman and Jeanne Watson, ‘The Sociability Project:  A Chronicle of Frustration and Achievement’, in Sociologists at Work: Essays on the Craft of Social Research, ed. Phillip E. Hammond (New York: Basic, 1964), 235–​321 (260). 23 David Riesman, Robert J. Potter and Jeanne Watson, ‘Sociability, Permissiveness, and Equality: A Preliminary Formulation’, Psychiatry 23 (1960): 323–​40 (331). 24 Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places:  Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings (New  York:  Free Press, 1963), 11. The presence of these ideas in Argentina is demonstrated by translations of discussions of ‘non verbal communication’ in contemporaneous sociological studies, for example Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen, ‘Origen, uso y codificación:  Bases para cinco categorías de conducta no verbal’, in Lenguaje y comunicación social, ed. Eliseo Verón (Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión, 1969), 51–​99; and Gino Germani’s account of group dynamics in ‘Social Change and Intergroup Conflicts’, in The New Sociology: Essays in Social Science and Social Theory in Honor of C. Wright Mills, ed. Irving Louis Horowitz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 391–​408. 25 Riesman, The Lonely Crowd, 26. 26 ‘Cocktail Parties  –​Are Hosts People?’ Newsweek 55, no.  18 (2 May 1960):  25. Sociology’s popularity led to many broadsides in the press. Playboy sneered that ‘majesty of means and poverty of results would seem to constitute the general sociological experience’. Murray Kempton, ‘Status-​Ticians in Limbo’, Playboy 8, no. 9 (September 1961): 117–​22 (118). 27 Riesman and Watson, ‘The Sociability Project’, 315. 28 ‘qui peu l’avoir d’encore un sud-​américaine sous-​développé qui viens vivre a N York [sic]’. Minujín also reports that Niki de Saint Phalle and Christo are always too busy to see her, and that she is struggling with her English. Marta Minujín, letter to Pierre Restany, n.d., PREST.XSAML11/​13–​14, Fonds Pierre Restany. On Restany’s role in establishing relationships between Latin American and European artists, see Isabel Plante, ‘Pierre Restany et l’Amérique latine:  Un détournement de l’axe Paris–​New York’, in Le Demi-​siècle de Pierre Restany, ed. Richard Leeman

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(Paris:  INHA/​Editions des cendres, 2009), 287–​309; and Berenice Gustavino, ‘Crossed Paths between France and Argentina’, trans. Simon Pleasance, Critique d’art 44 (Spring/​Summer 2015): 152–​69. 29 ‘New York est une ville dure surtout pour les étrangers et il y a tout un dosage subtil de standing social, de politique artistique, d’amitiés intéressées et de combines. Il y a aussi un manque d’intérêt de la part des galeries, des marchands et des critiques nationalistes pour tout ce qui se fait en dehors de l’ambiance culturelle américaine et plus précisément new-​yorkaise. Les artistes parisiens de New York t’ont déçue:  hélas … ils sont préoccupés avant tout de leur carrière, et leur position est plutôt délicate.’ Pierre Restany, letter to Marta Minujín, 23 December 1965, PREST.XSAML11/​16, Fonds Pierre Restany. 30 ‘I perhaps doing [sic] a show at Castelli next spring. Doing the Menesunda in London next Christmas.’ Marta Minujín, letter to Pierre Restany, n.d., PREST. XSAML11/​3, Fonds Pierre Restany. The plan to realise La Menesunda at the Institute of Contemporary Arts also failed to come to fruition. El batacazo did, however, garner press coverage; see for example ‘Latin Labyrinth: Marta Minujín’s Labyrinthine Art’, Newsweek 67, no. 8 (21 February 1966): 90. 31 Although Minujín worked with technology and got to know many artists associated with Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) in the USA, even collaborating on her 1967 interactive Minuphone telephone booth with the engineer Per Biorn via the organisation, she has related that she did not feel very welcome in this scene: ‘Billy Klüver never liked me … That circle was very sexist, and it was really strange for a woman, and all the more so a South American one, to get involved in art and technology.’ Marta Minujín, ‘Technical Psychedelia” ’, interview by Ana Longoni and Fernanda Carvajal, in Minuphone:  1967–​2010, ed. Ana Longoni and Fernanda Carvajal (Buenos Aires: Fundación Telefónica, 2010), 112–​33 (126). 32 Kaprow posited affinities between the Happenings and ‘practices marginal to the fine arts, such as parades, carnivals, games, expeditions, guided tours, orgies, religious ceremonies, and secular rituals’. Allan Kaprow, ‘The Happenings are Dead –​ Long Live the Happenings!’, Artforum 4, no. 7 (March 1966): 36–​9 (39). 33 This recalls Susan Sontag’s observation that the audience for the early Happenings was ‘loyal, appreciative, and for the most part experienced’, and that one saw ‘mostly the same faces again and again’. Susan Sontag, ‘Happenings:  An Art of Radical Juxtaposition’ (1962), in ‘Against Interpretation’ and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), 263–​74 (266). Minucode’s title links the ‘code’ needed to access the work with Minujín’s name, demanding that participants recognise her agency while cultivating a shimmer of celebrity branding. 34 In preparing for About:  Happenings it was decided not to replace the word ‘happening’ with the Spanish equivalent, in order to maintain an awareness of the term’s international lineage (‘La palabra “happening” significa “acontecimiento”. No la hemos re-​emplazado por la palabra española para mantener una denominación que hoy es internacional’). ‘REF:  Teatros Independientes no.  125’, 20 October 1966, Box 3, Folder 11, AR BDT 1970 CEA EA, Fondo Centro de Experimentación

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Audiovisual, Archivos del Instituto Di Tella, Biblioteca Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires. 35 Some critics were dismayed by the production of Pop art and Happenings in Latin America, notably Marta Traba, who accused these phenomena of aligning directly with the other expendable commodities of US consumer society (‘el arte se autocondena al mismo destino que los demás productos de la sociedad de consumo; apenas se gasta, cubre una espectativa y satisface episódicamente a su cliente, desaparece’). Marta Traba, Dos décadas vulnerables en las artes plásticas latinoamericanas, 1950–​1970 (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2005 [1973]), 61. 36 Although democratically elected, Illia won the 1963 election with a mere 25 per cent of the vote (many Peronists had been disenfranchised; those who could vote placed blank ballots) feeding the resentment that would contribute to the resurgence of political conflict. Antonius C.  G. M. Robben, Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 34. 37 See Laura Podalsky, Specular City: Transforming Culture, Consumption, and Space in Buenos Aires, 1955–​1973 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), particularly 148–​207. 38 Giunta, Avant-​Garde, Internationalism, and Politics, particularly 189–​241. 39 The Institute was named after the founder of the family business, Torcuato Di Tella, an Italian immigrant to Argentina who died in 1948. During the early 1940s Torcuato became interested in art and started to collect European painting. His son Guido, however, had different aspirations for the art centres that the Institute would ultimately encompass. Thomas C. Cochran and Ruben E. Reina, with Sue Nuttall, Entrepreneurship in Argentine Culture:  Torcuato Di Tella and SIAM (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962), 148. 40 These included the CAV, the Centro de Experimentación Audiovisual (Centre for Audio-​visual Experimentation), and the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (Latin American Centre for Advanced Musical Studies). For a history see John King, El Di Tella y el desarrollo cultural argentino en la década del sesenta, 2nd edn (Buenos Aires: Asunto Impreso Ediciones, 2007 [1985]). 41 Romero Brest invited figures from the USA and Europe, including Clement Greenberg and Restany (in 1964)  and Lawrence Alloway (1966), to act as prize judges. Alloway first explored the Buenos Aires art scene on an earlier visit in 1963, writing enthusiastically to his partner, the painter Sylvia Sleigh, that Buenos Aires was ‘a mixture of Paris and Milan –​crowded and active’. Lawrence Alloway, letter to Sylvia Sleigh, 23 February 1963, Box 7, Folder 12, Lawrence Alloway Papers (2003.M.46), Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Both Alloway and Restany published articles in the international art press about the artists and works they encountered:  Lawrence Alloway, ‘Latin America and International Art’, Art in America 53, no.  3 (June 1965):  64–​77 (Alloway specifically addresses the internationalising tactics of the Di Tella on 75); and Pierre Restany, ‘Buenos Ayres et le nouvel humanisme’, Domus 425 (April 1965): 34–​8. Such international networking was a key part of Romero Brest’s vision for the CAV, which sought to place Argentina –​or to be more exact, Buenos Aires –​on a par with New York

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and Paris. This was, however, predicated on the assumption that Argentina’s status was peripheral to those centres, as Romero Brest’s self-​proclaimed commitment to ‘drive out all vestiges of provincialism I might have’, through travel to the USA, Europe, Japan and other Latin American countries, indicates. Jorge Romero Brest, ‘Self-​Portrait’ (1972), in Jorge Romero Brest:  La cultura como provocación, ed. Edgardo Giménez, trans. Rafaela Gunner (Buenos Aires: Edgardo Giménez, 2006), 12–​63  (39). 42 Alejandro Blanco, Razón y modernidad:  Gino Germani y la sociología en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2006), 52. 43 Enrolment figures issued by the Statistics Office of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, UBA, in Norberto Rodríguez Bustamante, ‘Sociology and Reality in Latin America:  The Case of Argentina’, International Social Science Journal 31, no. 1 (1979): 86–​97  (97). 44 The social sciences attracted significant private US funding, including a Ford Foundation grant of $210,000 to UBA in 1960. Silvia Sigal, Intelectuales y poder en Argentina: La década del sesenta (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2002), 83. 45 Ibid., 86. Néstor García Canclini notes that students from the Department of Sociology at UBA helped conduct the first sociological study of art and its publics in Argentina for the Di Tella. This was a qualitative analysis of attendees at a 1961 exhibition (itself supported by the Di Tella) at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. Néstor García Canclini, La producción simbólica: Teoría y método en sociología del arte (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2017 [1979]), 116. The study offered a finely grained breakdown of its audience, featuring seventy-​one questions that covered personal details, attitudes to culture, preferred leisure activities and engagement with publicity. That over 50 per cent of respondents reported participating in some form of artistic activity, or knew someone who did, revealed an extremely specialised social subgroup, while the Di Tella’s role in initiating a study of an exhibition it had itself organised indicates how its modernising project brought sociology and art close together. Regina E. Gibaja, El público de arte: Encuesta en el Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1964), 28. 46 One of the best-​selling sociology books in Argentina was Juan José Sebreli’s Buenos Aires, vida cotidiana y alienación (Buenos Aires, Everyday Life and Alienation). However, the Argentine academic establishment, which favoured semiotics and structuralism, dismissed Sebreli’s Marxist approach. See Juan José Sebreli, Buenos Aires, vida cotidiana y alienación (Buenos Aires:  Sudamericana, 2003 [1964]), as well as Gino Germani’s account, ‘La sociología latinoamericana y el surgimiento de la sociológica científica’ (1963), in La sociología en la América Latina: Problemas y perspectivas (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1964), 1–​9. 47 Mariano Ben Plotkin, Freud in the Pampas:  The Emergence and Development of a Psychoanalytic Culture in Argentina (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 151. On the importance of psychoanalysis in Argentina, particularly during the dictatorship, see also Nancy Caro Hollander, Love in a Time of Hate:  Liberation Psychology in Latin America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997).

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48 Valeria Manzano charts how UBA ‘became a beacon of cultural modernization’ and how subjects such as sociology were ‘endowed with a halo of modernity that helps explain why youths wanted to pursue them, even when they were not certain about their future professional lives’. Valeria Manzano, The Age of Youth in Argentina: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality from Perón to Videla (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 55. 49 Sigal, Intelectuales y poder en Argentina, 87. For an excellent analysis of how Oscar Bony’s 1968 work La familia obrera (The Working-​Class Family) relates to the Di Tella’s links with developmentalism, see Niko Vicario, ‘Oscar Bony’s La familia obrera: The Labor and the Work’, ARTMargins 6, no. 2 (June 2017): 50–​7 1. 50 Other examples include a survey on ‘The Sociology of Pop’ in Primera plana, as part of an issue that devoted substantial coverage to Pop art. It presented a sociocultural analysis of contemporary art based on over seventy questions posed to artists including Minujín, highlighting the close relations between artists and the emerging institutional network. Germán Kratochwil and Marta Slemenson, ‘Sociología del pop’, Primera plana 4, no. 191 (23 August 1966): 77–​8. This article summarised findings that had been presented at a symposium on the sociology of intellectuals held at the CIS in July 1967. A more extended analysis was published as Germán Kratochwil and Marta Slemenson, ‘Un arte de difusores: Apuntes para la comprensión de un movimiento plástico de vanguardia en Buenos Aires, de sus creadores, sus difusores y su público’, in El intelectual latinoamericano: Un simposio sobre sociología de los intelectuales, ed. Juan F. Marsal (Buenos Aires: Editorial del Instituto Di Tella, 1970), 171–​201. Podalsky notes the prominence of popular sociology in Primera plana, which frequently ran surveys, polls and questionnaires on topics ranging from contemporary art to sexuality. Podalsky, Specular City, 159, 189–​92. 51 Philip Derbyshire, ‘Who Was Oscar Masotta? Psychoanalysis in Argentina’, Radical Philosophy 158 (November–December 2009): 11–​23 (11). In 1967, Masotta presented a paper on semiotics during the ‘Simposio sobre teoría de la comunicación y modelos lingüísticos en las ciencias sociales’ (‘Symposium on Communication Theory and Linguistic Models in the Social Sciences’). It was published in a book of structuralist sociology edited by Verón, testifying to the permeability of the Argentine intellectual landscape. Oscar Masotta, ‘Reflexiones presemiológicas sobre la historieta:  El esquematismo’, in Verón, Lenguaje y comunicación social, 192–​222. 52 ‘difícil de clasificar, “intranquilizador” para los cánones vigentes en el campo artístico y cultural’. Ana Longoni and Mariano Mestman, Del Di Tella a ‘Tucumán arde’: Vanguardia artística y política en el 68 argentino (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 2013 [2000]), 74. 53 Blanco, Razón y modernidad, 203. 54 Luis Camnitzer, Conceptualism in Latin American Art:  Didactics of Liberation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 181. Camnitzer compares Latin American conceptualism of the 1960s and 1970s with the contemporaneous Tupamaros guerrilla movement in Uruguay, arguing that this is ‘more intimately connected with

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what is known as Latin American conceptualism than any artworks produced by either the European or North American stream of conceptual art’ (10). This builds on Ramírez’s contention that what distinguished Latin American conceptualism from North American and British Conceptual art was its sociopolitical engagement, and its continued investment in materiality to communicate with a diverse range of publics. Mari Carmen Ramírez, ‘Tactics for Thriving on Adversity: Conceptualism in Latin America, 1960–​1980’, expanded version of ‘Blueprint Circuits: Conceptual Art and Politics in Latin America’ (1993), in Stephen Bann, László Beke, Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver, Rachel Weiss et al., Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin 1950s–​1980s (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999), 53–​7 1. 55 Each participant was documented so thoroughly that the first evening became something of an endurance test, with several people fleeing toward the exit when they could bear the wait no longer. The novelist Bernardo Verbitsky mischievously speculated that this baroque process was designed to irritate the spectator, and then record their annoyance. Bernardo Verbitsky, ‘Un espectáculo revolucionario’, Confirmado (3 November 1966): 53, Box 69, Folder 4, Allan Kaprow Papers. 56 Minujín’s link with UBA on Simultaneidad en simultaneidad is significant given that the institution developed an ‘ambitious programme of investigations which established the profile of the social scientist’ during the 1960s (‘un ambicioso programa de investigaciones que fijaba el perfil del sociológico científico’). Sigal, Intelectuales y poder en Argentina, 86. 57 Podalsky, Specular City, 7. 58 Néstor García Canclini, ‘Modernity after Postmodernity’ (1990), trans. Gabriel Pérez-​Barreiro, in Beyond the Fantastic:  Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America, ed. Gerardo Mosquera (London: Iniva, 1995), 20–​51 (43). 59 ‘en este happening de Marta Minujín, sospecho precisamente la presencia implícita de una referencia a este proceso por el cual grupos de élite elaboran los elementos simbólicos de su proprio encerramiento cultural’. Eliseo Verón, ‘Un happening de los medios masivos:  Notas para un análisis semántico’, in Oscar Masotta, Marta Minujín, Alicia Páez, Roberto Jacoby, Eliseo Verón, Eduardo Costa et al., Happenings (Buenos Aires: Jorge Álvarez, 1967), 75–​90 (90). For Verón’s interests in communication and structuralism, see Eliseo Verón, Conducta, estructura y comunicación (Buenos Aires: Editorial Tiempo Contemporáneo, 1972 [1962]). 60 ‘un estremecimiento me corrió por la médula: por fin me acercaría a los iniciados’. Jaime Potenze, typescript for ‘Happenings  –​“Simultaneidad en Simultaneidad” ’, Criterio 1151, n.d. Box 3, Folder 6, AR BDT 1970 CEA EA, Fondo Centro de Experimentación Audiovisual, Archivos del Instituto Di Tella, Biblioteca Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. 61 Its fusion of the sociological and the therapeutic can also be read as a gloss on the group experiments conducted by the psychoanalytic populariser Enrique Pichon-​ Rivière during this period. These included a Minucode-​like dance for ‘people active in the arts, politics, or society’, during which ‘men and women were matched by computer according to background, social role, and physical characteristics’.

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Plotkin, Freud in the Pampas, 106. This contrasted the more orthodox methodologies of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association (APA), founded in 1942. 62 Hernán Galperin, ‘Transforming Television in Argentina:  Market Development and Policy Reform in the 1990s’, in Latin Politics, Global Media, ed. Elizabeth Fox and Silvio Waisbord (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 22–​37 (25). 63 One magazine reported that Minujín had difficulty securing involvement from anyone other than Canal 13. ‘Una invasión con minifaldas’, Confirmado (19 September 1966):  54, Box 69, Folder 4, Allan Kaprow Papers. Nonetheless, she received significant support from Argentine companies. Dumont loaned the televisions (Harvard’s 1023 model), Tonomac the Platino radios and Sucesos Argentinos rolls of high-​speed Kodak Ektachrome film. Their willingness indicates that they saw the Happening as a marketing opportunity. Receipts and correspondence in Gestión de Premios y Exposiciones, DVD 20, AR BDT 1970 CAV GPE 0703, Fondo del Centro de Artes Visuales, Archivos del Instituto Di Tella. 64 Elizabeth Bennett Hupp situates Minujín’s work in relation to that of David Lamelas and Lea Lublin, arguing that all three ‘inverted the media’s culling process of time, space, format and consumer presence, in order to demystify or critique a foreign consumerism’. Elizabeth Bennett Hupp, ‘After the Cull’, in Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader, ed. Tanya Leighton (London: Tate, 2008), 246–​57 (248). Although Minujín is not cited by Ramírez as an example of Latin American ideological conceptualism, Simultaneidad en simultaneidad resonates with her assessment that ‘in its appropriation, exaltation, and critical use of mass media, Arte de los medios was emblematic of the aims and failures of the postwar Argentinean modernization project. In this sense, it can be seen as an art that turns upon itself the very tools of the utopian dream that constituted it.’ Ramírez, ‘Tactics for Thriving on Adversity’, 66. 65 For the causes of the 1966 coup, notably the elite’s fear of unionist and Peronist factions, see Guillermo O’Donnell, Bureaucratic Authoritarianism:  Argentina, 1966–​1973, in Comparative Perspective, trans. James McGuire in collaboration with Rae Flory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 39–​7 1. David Rock argues that the Nationalist movement maintained a stranglehold on Argentina’s major institutions from the mid-​1950s through to the end of the dictatorship in 1983, encompassing ‘the military, the church, the political parties and mass movements, and even the ostensibly left-​wing groups committed to “armed struggle” ’. David Rock, Authoritarian Argentina:  The Nationalist Movement, Its History and Its Impact (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 194. 66 Onganía also passed new laws ending the autonomy of the universities, bringing the modernising boom to a close. 67 The left did not view this connection favourably, condemning the Di Tella’s association with the international counterculture. In a memorable sequence from their 1968 documentary La hora de los hornos (The Time of the Furnaces), the filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino spliced images of a Happening at the Di Tella’s art centres with footage of cattle being slaughtered in an abattoir and Argentina’s rural poor, attacking what they saw as the Institute’s complicity

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with the ruling elite. Octavio Getino and Fernando E.  Solanas, dirs., La hora de los hornos (Buenos Aires:  Cinesur, 2008 [1968]), DVD. The following year, Solanas and Getino published their influential manifesto for a ‘Third Cinema’, in which they argued: ‘cultural penetration, pedagogical colonization, and mass communications all join forces today in a desperate attempt to absorb, neutralize, or eliminate any expression that responds to an attempt at decolonization’. From this perspective, Minujín’s engagement with both mass media and sociology reads as complicity with imperialism and colonisation. Octavio Getino and Fernando E. Solanas, ‘Toward a Third Cinema’, Tricontinental 13, English edn (July–​August 1969): 107–​32  (117). 68 After 1966, artistic engagements with sociology in Argentina moved away from semiotics and structuralism, toward an activist sociology that could address class conflict and repression. This culminated in Tucumán arde (Tucumán Is Burning) of 1968, when artists including Graciela Carnevale and León Ferrari collaborated with trade unionists and sociologists to gather data on the traumatic impact of Onganía’s economic policies on sugar cane workers in Tucumán province. The context for this initiative is given in Longoni and Mestman, Del Di Tella a ‘Tucumán arde’, particularly 178–​236. See also Graciela Carnevale, interview by Cristina Freire and Ana Longoni (2007), in Conceptualismos del sur/​sul, ed. Cristina Freire and Ana Longoni (São Paulo: Annablume, 2009), 247–​57. 69 ‘Super Heterodyne’ refers to a mode of radio and television reception whereby the receiver emits a tuneable signal that mixes with the incoming one, producing a combined frequency. 70 Luc Perreault, ‘Avec son circuit, Marta Minujín délaisse le happening et débouche sur la science’, La Presse, Montreal, 29 April 1967, PREST.XSAML.11/​55, Fonds Pierre Restany. Although the event was initially scheduled for the Pavilion, La Presse reported it could not provide the necessary technical support, hence the partial relocation. Luc Perreault, ‘Une machine IBM a choisi 60 personnes pour le circuit de Marta Minujín’, La Presse, Montreal, 27 April 1967, PREST.XSAML11/​54, Fonds Pierre Restany. 7 1 Perreault, ‘Une machine IBM’. 72 Marta Minujín, draft questionnaire for Circuit (Super Heterodyne), Proyectos de Obra I, 1960–​70, Archivo Especial Marta Minujín. 73 Minujín was invited to participate in Information, and unsuccessfully attempted to realise the transcontinental ambition that had been thwarted in Simultaneidad en simultaneidad, relaying in correspondence with McShine that, ‘I am trying here to get some people to get the satellite to make something simultaneous.’ Marta Minujín, letter to Kynaston McShine, 22 April 1970, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Exhibition Records, 1970–​79, Information, 934.7, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 74 On Haacke’s obfuscation of sociological surveying with his awkwardly phrased and leading question, see Julia Bryan-​Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 193.

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75 In the USA, the link between the survey and quantitative rather than qualitative sociology had long been distrusted, with Pitirim Sorokin decrying ‘the age of quantophrenia and numerology’ (italics in original). Pitirim Sorokin, Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology and Related Sciences (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1956), 103. 76 ‘Tous les membres d’un même groupe devront posséder des caractères avoisinants comme, par exemple, une taille élevée, un poids réduit, beaucoup de tics nerveux, etc.’ Luc Perreault, ‘Circuit’, La Presse, Montreal, 15 April 1967, 25, PREST.XSAML11/​ 59, Fonds Pierre Restany. 77 Perreault, ‘Avec son circuit’. 78 Minujín tellingly describes her work as ‘invasions’ (‘invasiones’) in Kratochwil and Slemenson, ‘Sociología del pop’, 77. 79 Erving Goffman, Stigma:  Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (London: Penguin, 1968 [1963]), 15, 14. 80 The CIAR was conceived as a private institution in 1965 and opened its doors in 1966. The Center’s Park Avenue townhouse, the Percy Pyne House, was donated by Margaret Strong (Marquise de Cuevas) of the Rockefeller family. As Fabiana Serviddio notes, ‘the proximity of CIAR with this economic policy organization did not go unnoticed by the Latin American artistic community as well as by the general public, which often perceived it as an “establishment-​élite” Rockefeller institution’. At the same time, the creation of a separate organisation for Latin American artists was resented as ghettoising. Fabiana Serviddio, ‘Exhibiting Identity: Latin America between the Imaginary and the Real’, Journal of Social History 44, no. 2 (Winter 2010): 481–​98 (491). 81 Daniel R.  Quiles, introduction to Minujín, ‘1,000 Words’, 157. Luis Camnitzer details how artistic dissatisfaction with the CIAR continued into the early 1970s, when a group of Latin American artists living in the USA began a boycott against the institution because of the connections many board members had with military interventions in South America. This led to the foundation of two activist organisations, the Museo Latinoamericano and the Movimiento por la Independencia Cultural de Latino América (MICLA). Luis Camnitzer, ‘The Museo Latinoamericano and MICLA’ (1992), in On Art, Artists, Latin America, and Other Utopias, ed. Rachel Weiss (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 164–​74 (166). As Ramírez contends, the curation, circulation, perception and representation of Latin American art in the USA have long ‘not only gone hand in hand with US foreign policies but … also replicated the uneven axis of exchange between both continents’. Mari Carmen Ramírez, ‘Beyond “The Fantastic”: Framing Identity in US Exhibitions of Latin American Art’, Art Journal 51, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 60–​8 (60). 82 Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan note that even as the theme reflected the popularity of idealised ‘Everyman’-​style humanism, ‘its intellectual foundation was nevertheless under threat as well’, pointing to Michel Foucault’s poststructuralist attack on humanism at the end of his 1966 book The Order of Things:  An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan, ‘Dusting off the Souvenir’, in Expo 67:  Not Just a Souvenir, ed. Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 3–​24 (5).

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83 Moshe Safdie, Habitat:  Expo 67, interview by John Gray (Montreal:  Tundra, 1967), 8. 84 Lisa Tickner, ‘“Export Britain”: Pop Art, Mass Culture and the Export Drive’, Art History 35, no. 2 (April 2012): 394–​419 (408). 85 Daniela Sheinin, ‘Kookie Thoughts:  Imagining the United States Pavilion at Expo ’67 (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bubble)’, Journal of Transnational American Studies 5, no. 1 (2013): 1–​19 (5), http://​escholarship.org/​uc/​ item/​6c81k3t1 (accessed 17 January 2020). 86 For Jonathan Massey, the United States Information Agency (USIA), which commissioned the Pavilion, ‘coopted’ Fuller’s radical cybernetic vision of egalitarian connectivity ‘for triumphalist purposes’. Jonathan Massey, ‘Buckminster Fuller’s Cybernetic Pastoral:  The United States Pavilion at Expo 67’, Journal of Architecture 11, no. 4 (2006): 463–​83 (464). 87 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media:  The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994 [1964]), 57. 88 Ibid., 46. 89 On appropriation and primitivism in McLuhan’s rhetoric and the North American counterculture more widely, see Mark Watson, ‘The Countercultural “Indian”: Visualizing Retribalization at the Human Be-​In’, in West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965–​1977, ed. Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press and Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, 2012), 209–​23. 90 Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 37. 91 As reflected in Jurgen Ruesch’s assertion that:  ‘it has widely been noted how, under authoritarian regimes, human beings turn more and more toward the perception of the nonverbal, the evaluation of nonverbally codified things, and expression through gesture and action’. Jurgen Ruesch and Weldon Kees, Nonverbal Communication:  Notes on the Visual Perception of Human Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 5. 92 Irving Louis Horowitz, ‘The Life and Death of Project Camelot’ (1965), in Professing Sociology: Studies in the Life Cycle of Social Science (Chicago: Aldine, 1968), 287–​304 (298). 93 Minujín and Schneemann met during Minujín’s 1965–​66 trip to New  York; Schneemann attended El batacazo in 1966, reporting to their mutual friend Jean-​ Jacques Lebel: ‘we’ll all be at Marta Minujín’s Environment tomorrow –​going like wild-​fire, perils of Pauline’. Carolee Schneemann, letter to Jean-​Jacques Lebel, 7 February 1966, in Correspondence Course:  An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle, ed. Kristine Stiles (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2010), 102. The year before Expo ’67, Minujín and Schneemann corresponded about their use of technology, with Minujín relating how she had projected recordings of her participants over the walls of the Di Tella for Simultaneidad

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en simultaneidad. Schneemann in turn shared her preparations for Snows as part of Angry Arts Week during January 1967, expressing her intense desire to see documentation of Minujín’s Happening, and comparing their commitments to exploring communication technologies:  ‘C’est sur la grande route utiliser, faire concrète les choses du technologie.’ Marta Minujín, letter to Carolee Schneemann, November 1966; and Carolee Schneemann, letter to Marta Minujín, 17 November 1966, Box 27, Folder 5, Carolee Schneemann Papers (950001), Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. 94 One journalist described how the taste of the sweet stayed in their mouth throughout the performance, contrasting with the violence of the ensuing imagery. Yves Robillard, ‘D’un happening, de la fête et des bonbons …’, La Presse, Montreal, 16 September 1967, 43, Box 18, Folder 2, Carolee Schnnemann Papers (M1892), Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University. 95 Carolee Schneemann, ‘Night Crawlers’, 1967, in Carolee Schneemann, More than Meat Joy:  Performance Works and Selected Writings, ed. Bruce R. McPherson (Kingston, NY: Documentext, 1997 [1979]), 159–​60. 96 Ibid., 159. 97 Ibid., 160. 98 Carolee Schneemann, ‘Night Crawlers –​Expo ’67’, n.d., Box 18, Folder 2, Carolee Schnnemann Papers (Stanford). 99 David Joselit, Feedback:  Television against Democracy (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 2007), 157. 100 Center for Inter-​American Relations, Minucode press release (14 May 1968), 2, Proyectos de Obra I, 1960–​70, Archivo Especial Marta Minujín. 101 ‘Environment’, 23. 102 Andrew V. Uroskie describes comparable effects in Robert Whitman’s expanded cinema works, proposing that ‘the flickering, spectral bodies’ projected over the performers in Prune.Flat of 1965 ‘served not so much as images but as screens for the spectator’s phantasmal projection’. Andrew V. Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 144. In 1966, Minujín organised and performed in a recreation of Prune.Flat (Ciruela chata) at the Di Tella. ‘Happenings: El jardín de las ciruelas’, Primera plana 4, no. 203 (15 November 1966): 74. 103 Tony Martin, ‘Statement by Tony Martin’, in Minujín, ‘Text of the Press Conference’, c. 1968. Martin recounts his involvement in the counterculture on the West and East Coasts, notably the San Francisco Tape Music Center, in Tony Martin, ‘Stirring the Intermix’, interview by Liz Glass, in Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, ed. Andrew Blauvelt (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015), 403–​10. 104 Martin, ‘Statement by Tony Martin’. 105 Tony Martin, ‘Tony Martin’s Game Room’, 1968, Box 7, Howard Wise Gallery Records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 106 Those who entered Minujín’s adapted phone booth dialled a number to trigger a range of phenomena, including a television screen on the booth’s floor that

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flickered into life, and a Polaroid camera that snapped their photograph. Lil Picard expressively described Minuphone as ‘the latest brainchild of this season’s technical-​light-​crazy-​mod-​hippie-​gay hullabaloo’. Lil Picard, clipping from unknown publication, n.d., PREST.XSAML11/​44, Fonds Pierre Restany. 107 Christoph Grunenberg describes how, in light shows, ‘as the perceptual capacities are sharpened and accelerated, the separation of sensual impressions becomes blurred and discrete impressions fuse into one intense synaesthetic experience in which colours produce sounds and forms can be perceived with tactile intensity’. Christoph Grunenberg, ‘The Politics of Ecstasy: Art for the Mind and Body’, in Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era, ed. Christoph Grunenberg (London: Tate, 2005), 11–​43 (17). 108 Branden W. Joseph argues that viewers of EPI shows ‘did not feel returned to tribal unity or subjective self-​possession so much as uprooted and disoriented by the incessant bombardment of audiovisual shocks’. Branden W.  Joseph, ‘ “My mind split open”: Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable’, Grey Room 8 (Summer 2002): 80–​107 (91). Conversely, Michel Oren relates that after 1965, USCO ‘began to feel that overload was not only causing audiences pain but failing to guide their experiences’, leading them to consider how to immerse people and bring them down gently. Michel Oren, ‘USCO: “Getting out of Your Mind to Use Your Head” ’, Art Journal 69, no.  4 (Winter 2010):  76–​95 (78). USCO member Gerd Stern elaborates this concern in Douglas Davis, Art and the Future: A History/​Prophecy of the Collaboration between Science, Technology and Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 157–​60. 109 Even with respect to Simultaneidad en simultaneidad, press reports emphasised the chaotic nature of proceedings on the second night, when a group of ‘hippies’ (identified as such because of their beards and long hair) invaded the hall. ‘Happenings …y llegó el gran día’, Primera plana 4, no. 201 (1 November 1966): 71. 110 Michael Callahan of USCO related to Richard Kostelanetz how he had been invited to the Albert Einstein Medical College in Philadelphia, ‘where they want to talk to us about building a funny room to test people’s reactions to over-​ stimulation and under-​stimulation’. USCO interview by Richard Kostelanetz, in Richard Kostelanetz, The Theatre of Mixed Means: An Introduction to Happenings, Kinetic Environments and Other Mixed-​Means Performances (London:  Pitman, 1970 [1967]), 267. Kostelanetz argued that ‘pure’ Happenings and USCO’s ‘kinetic environments’ should be seen on a continuum, as they were all ‘structurally open in time and, as forms, capable of encouraging participational attention’ (6). 111 Andrew Wilson recounts how Leary’s experiments with hallucinogens ‘led him to the realization that the power of the psychedelic experience –​and especially that offered by LSD –​lay in areas that the science of psychology was ill prepared to assess’. Andrew Wilson, ‘Spontaneous Underground: An Introduction to London Psychedelic Scenes, 1965–​1968’, in Summer of Love: Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis and Counterculture in the 1960s, ed. Christoph Grunenberg and Jonathan Harris (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005), 63–​98 (64).

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112 On countercultural and institutional LSD trials during the postwar period, see Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream (London: Heinemann, 1988), particularly 136–​70 for Leary’s Harvard adventures. The Harvard Department of Social Relations was founded in 1946 as a joint collaboration uniting sociology, psychology and anthropology. Similar institutes opened elsewhere, such as the Stanford Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences in 1954. 113 Timothy Leary, The Politics of Ecstasy (London: Paladin, 1970 [1968]), 31. 114 Ibid., 38. 115 This commitment is all the more striking given Onganía’s persecution of the counterculture. Manzano, The Age of Youth in Argentina, 113–​14. 116 Fernando García links the psychedelic ‘underground diaries’ that Minujín produced in Buenos Aires during 1969 to the therapeutic use of hallucinogens by the psychoanalyst Alberto E. Fontana, as outlined in his 1970 book Psicoanálisis y cambio (Psychoanalysis and Change). However, fearing the kind of rejection by the Argentine scientific community experienced by Leary in the USA, Fontana stressed the importance of using LSD within a controlled psychoanalytic setting. Fernando García, Marta Minujín: Los años psicodélicos (Buenos Aires: Mansalva, 2015), 24. 117 This was most explicit in Minujín’s 1968 Di Tella installation Importación/​ exportación (Import/​Export), for which she ‘imported’ countercultural materials and sold items from a shop in the display, so that the work created a utopian zone apart while registering the counterculture’s marketability. 118 Daniel R. Quiles, ‘Burn Out My Potentiality:  Destruction and Collectivity in Greco and Minujín’, in Beginning with a Bang! From Confrontation to Intimacy: An Exhibition of Argentine Contemporary Artists, 1960–​2007, ed. Victoria Noorthoorn (New York: Americas Society, 2007), 69–​80 (76). 119 Bishop, Artificial Hells, 118. 120 This is Marcuse’s central contention in One-​Dimensional Man (1964). It continued to inform writings such as An Essay on Liberation (1969), which declared that the ‘continuing exploitation’ of capitalist society ‘is not only hidden behind the technological veil, but actually “transfigured” ’ by it. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (London: Allen Lane, 1969), 13. 121 For artist-​activist protests at MoMA in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC), among others groups, see Bryan-​Wilson, Art Workers, particularly  13–​39. 122 Marta Minujín, directions for participants in Interpenning, n.d., Proyectos de Obra II, 1971–​79, Archivo Especial Marta Minujín. 123 Marta Minujín, ‘The Interpenning,’ n. d., Proyectos de Obra II, 1971–​79, Archivo Especial Marta Minujín. 124 Museum of Modern Art, New  York, ‘Art Event Staged by Marta Minujín in Museum Garden’, press release 96 (August 1972), Proyectos de Obra II, 1971–​79, Archivo Especial Marta Minujín. 125 ‘Se incentiva la imaginación generalmente amortiguada por los slogans, la propaganda y la rutina del trabajo diario. El suceso ocurre y termina, luego la memoria

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cumple su cometido, lo deforma y recrea.’ Marta Minujín, ‘Marta Minujín:  Sus “sucesos” y la creciente desaparición de las galerías y marchands’, interview by M. L. T., El país, Montevideo, 19 July 1965, Prensa I, 1960–​80, Archivo Especial Marta Minujín. 126 Herbert Marcuse, One-​Dimensional Man:  Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (New York: Routledge, 2002 [1964]), 3. 127 Sven Lütticken, ‘An Arena in which to Reenact’, in Life, Once More:  Forms of Reenactment in Contemporary Art, ed. Sven Lütticken (Rotterdam: Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, 2005), 17–​60 (25). 128 Marcuse, One-​Dimensional Man, 14. 129 Ibid., 116–​17. 130 Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (London: Faber, 1970 [1969]), 178–​204. 131 Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, 201. 132 MoMA, ‘Art Event Staged by Marta Minujín in Museum Garden’, press release 96. 133 Energy Fields, in Robert Crouch and Ciara Ennis, Juan Downey: Radiant Nature (Los Angeles:  Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions and Pitzer College Art Galleries, 2017), 109. 134 Corresponding with this utopian vision, Marcuse allowed for the possibility that technology could be used to achieve liberation:  ‘Released from the bondage to exploitation, the imagination, sustained by the achievements of science, could turn its productive power to the radical reconstruction of experience and the universe of experience.’ Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 45. 135 Minujín pursued other collaborations with artists from Latin America living in New York, notably a proposed magazine with the Argentine writer and poet Julian Cairol intended to link up Latin American practitioners living and working in the USA. ‘CHA/​CHA/​CHA: Revista de critica de arte dedicada a la investigación de producto artístico Latinoamericano’, n.d., Proyectos de Obra II, 1971–​79, Archivo Especial Marta Minujín. This folder also contains transcripts of interviews with Downey and Enrique Castro-​Cid for a planned first issue. 136 The Soft Gallery echoes Hélio Oiticica’s hallucinogenic experiments in London and New York during the early 1970s. Minujín, Downey and Oiticica are linked by their different but related explorations of marginality as a construct. Luke Skrebowski analyses Oiticica’s formulation of marginality in relation to Marcuse, in ‘Revolution in the Aesthetic Revolution:  Hélio Oiticica and the Concept of Creleisure’, Third Text 26, no. 1 (January 2012): 65–​78 (70–​2). 137 The New Group, a loosely affiliated collective of artists who coalesced around Douglas Davis, was active in Washington in the late 1960s and the 1970s. 138 Juan Downey, score for Communication (1968), in Crouch and Ennis, Juan Downey, 98. 139 Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, rev. edn (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1954 [1950]), 36. 140 Julieta González interprets Downey’s sculptures and videos as manifesting the shift with second-​order cybernetics from homeostatic maintenance to dynamic

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feedback networks, in ‘Beyond Technology: Juan Downey’s Whole Earth’, Afterall 37 (Autumn/​ Winter 2014):  16–​ 27. See also Julieta González, ‘Juan Downey’s Communications Utopia’, in Juan Downey:  Una utopía de la comunicación, ed. Julieta González and Arely Ramírez Moyao (Mexico City:  Fundación Olga y Rufino Tamayo, 2013), 10–​81; and Nicolás Guagnini, ‘Feedback in the Amazon’, October 125 (Summer 2008): 91–​116. 141 It stated:  ‘you will be entertained … by Martha [sic] Minujín. We are sure that you will agree that this alone is worth the price of admission. Come early and we’ll have some fun.’ Nicaraguan Earthquake Art Relief Managuan Homeless Settlement Committee, invitation to Sotheby Parke-Bernet benefit, 12 June 1973, Marta Minujín Studio Archive, Buenos Aires. 142 Taylor Mead, ‘Kidnappening’, n.d., Proyectos de Obra II, 1971–​79, Archivo Especial Marta Minujín. 143 ‘Ty’s Class Notes’, Kidnappening participant report, n.d., Proyectos de Obra II, 1971–​79, Archivo Especial Marta Minujín. Ironically, it transpired that this kidnapper’s victim was a sociology teacher who taught police trainees. The multiple reports on Kidnappening in Minujín’s archive indicate her enduring predilection for surveying, but their qualitative, discursive nature differs from Minucode and Circuit (Super Heterodyne). 144 Laura Cavestany, Kidnappening participant report, n.d., Proyectos de Obra II, 1971–​79, Archivo Especial Marta Minujín. 145 ‘Ty’s Class Notes’. 146 Violence between student-​worker alliances and the government began in earnest in May 1969 with popular uprisings in Córdoba known as the Cordobazo. 147 See Donald Clark Hodges, Argentina, 1943–​1976:  The National Revolution and Resistance (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1976), 64–​85. 148 Although the ‘disappearances’ of the 1976–​83 dictatorship were still to come, the number of assassinations by right-​wing death squads during the period of ‘democratic’ rule between May 1973 and March 1976 stands at 1,165. Robben, Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina, 138. 149 Eileen Spikol, Kidnappening participant report, n.d., Proyectos de Obra II, 1971–​ 79, Archivo Especial Marta Minujín. 150 ‘Diane from the Everglades’, Kidnappening participant report on Max’s Kansas City wine list, n.d., Proyectos de Obra II, 1971–​79, Archivo Especial Marta Minujín. 151 Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (London: Allen Lane, 1972), 101. See also Herbert Marcuse, ‘Art in the One-​Dimensional Society’, Arts Magazine 41, no. 7 (May 1967): 26–​31; and ‘Art and Revolution’, Partisan Review 2 (Spring 1972): 174–​87. 152 Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt, 116. 153 Ibid., 113.

Carolee Schneemann’s group work

The history of Carolee Schneemann’s relationship with the Happening is a conflicted, critical one. The artist appeared in Claes Oldenburg’s 1962 Ray Gun Theater performances at The Store (1961–​62) and, as the decade progressed, developed her own interpretation of the form that she termed ‘Kinetic Theatre’, involving group work, the combination of bodies with collage and junk materials, and the incorporation of projected images from her own films into performance environments.1 But by the time she featured in Harald Szeemann’s survey of the field with Happening & Fluxus of 1970 at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Schneemann felt that her contributions to the worlds of Happenings and Fluxus had become marginalised.2 Since the 2010s, this picture has been transformed. Paralleling a series of major exhibitions and awards, a significant wave of Schneemann scholarship has gone some way to counteract her longstanding institutional neglect.3 Yet much of this writing focuses on the radical eroticism of the artist’s work, specifically Schneemann’s use of her own body to address the question of whether a ‘nude woman artist’ could be ‘both image and image maker’.4 Because of this, research has concentrated predominantly on her performance Meat Joy (1964) and film Fuses (1964–​67), while the rest of Schneemann’s oeuvre remains comparatively overlooked.5 This chapter seeks to shift focus not only onto other works, but also onto Schneemann’s sustained investigation of group dynamics and communication patterns. By extending the Happening’s participatory action into Kinetic Theatre, Schneemann aimed to establish far deeper psychological connections among her performers than Kaprow or Minujín, rehearsing over time with a specific group. This approach can be linked to her early interaction with the Judson Dance Theater, but her group work did not replicate the dance company template to which the Judson ascribed, notwithstanding its openness to nonprofessionals.6 Schneemann chose not to use the same people for all her group works.7 Instead, she recruited performers, trained and untrained, as she travelled for particular pieces, remaining adamant that she did not want ‘to keep a constant troupe together but [wanted] to let each move on with what

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we had explored … it wasn’t like a school, a company, a fixed practice’.8 While this was partly an effect of time and budgetary constraints, it also meant that Schneemann’s group work became acutely attuned to the politics of communication, as relationships across a constellation of people constantly disintegrated and re-​formed. For Schneemann, one of the key benefits of Kinetic Theatre was precisely that it could ‘keep changing, letting people go on … absorbing disasters and mistakes’.9 In order to retain this openness and adaptability, while fostering psychosocial bonds among the members of any given configuration, Schneemann devised a set of contact relation activities to establish ‘a mutually accepting tissue’ between individuals.10 This biological metaphor conveys the extent to which Schneemann hoped separate ‘non-​idealized’ bodies might meld into an interconnected whole during performance, operating ‘as one organism’.11 A photograph by Max Waldman from one contact relation exercise shows five men and women sat in a circle, four of whom have placed one of their arms on the person next to them, establishing a physical line of connectivity (Figure 3.1). Nearly all of the performers’ heads are bowed. The only one whose face can be seen has his eyes shut, establishing an equivalence between bodily intimacy and inner reflexivity, but framing the latter as a collaborative endeavour. Although their cross-​legged postures seem relaxed, the performers’ arm muscles are flexed, and the man nearest the camera clasps the head of the person next to him in a powerful grip. As this image intimates, the physical interrelation that Schneemann explored was not just erotic, but operated in dialogue with a rich array of contemporary sociology and psychiatry that was intensely preoccupied with the effects of interpersonal relations.12 Schneemann’s Happenings were concerned with the challenge of fostering organic connectivity without erasing difference. In this respect they paralleled debates about the relationship between communication and control propagated by cybernetics –​particularly as it morphed into studies of social interaction and antipsychiatry’s challenge to normative models of ‘sanity’ and ‘insanity’ –​but also operated in distinct counterpoint to them.13 Schneemann’s group work articulates a number of pressing questions: how can people communicate differently? What forms of subjectivity might emerge through unorthodox communication channels? How can bodies unlearn socially ingrained behaviours and instead develop interactive performativity? In unravelling these concerns, this chapter builds on scholarly interventions by Kenneth White, Erica Levin and Pamela M. Lee that have articulated the relationship between technology and control in Schneemann’s work.14 The critical response to her practice recognised the centrality of this dynamic from an early stage. In 1970 the New Scientist printed a feature about Schneemann, while she was preparing her Electronic Activation Room installation for Happening & Fluxus, which related how she sought to ‘use technology to

Carolee Schneemann’s group work

Carolee Schneemann, Illinois Central group work exercises, c. 1966–​68. Photograph by Max Waldman.

create an exciting “environment” in which man and machine can interact to their mutual benefit’. It linked this to her longstanding interest in ‘the psychological and behavioural aspects of audience response’, and desire ‘to invoke, or rather, provoke, audience participation with theatre, and “happenings” ’.15 However, I focus less on the technologies of Schneemann’s works than on how her conceptualisation of psychosocial relations between individuals within their environments engaged with innovations in sociology and psychology.

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Schneemann’s reformulation of the Happening as ‘basic psycho-​social guerrilla life-​fare’ began in the early 1960s and lasted until her final large-​scale group work Thames Crawling (1970), conceived as a ‘form of “farewell” ’ to collective physical exchange.16 The artist’s cessation of group work could be interpreted as exhaustion, but this chapter articulates a more positive trajectory, moving through the group work of the 1960s to propose that the countercultural models of communication tested in her Happenings went on to form a central strand of feminist art practice in the 1970s.17 Opening lines of communication In a set of notes from 1965, Schneemann reflected: ‘we are at sea in a contemporary situation saturated with images, materials, information, news, brutalities … Cultural conditions now are like a surrogate for how our brain and sorting-​sensing mechanisms have to work.’18 The Happening, she contended, was ‘a mixed-​media form’ that could ‘move into this cultural complexity and personalize it, frame it, cast into a space and time de-​lineation’.19 Schneemann’s understanding of the Happening as inherently bound up with, and able to act on, its psychosocial context coheres with the emphasis in psychotherapy and sociology on the intricate communicative networks uniting individual, group and environment. As already noted in the introduction to this book, a comparable embrace of interconnectivity lay at the heart of Jurgen Ruesch and Gregory Bateson’s study Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry. This was exemplified by its claim that: there exists really no fundamental difference between the psychotherapist who deals with the functional aspects of the interpersonal system, the social scientist who is concerned with the larger superpersonal systems, and the physiologist who copes with the interaction of an organism with his surroundings in terms of physical and chemical events.20

Schneemann’s group work took a similarly integrated approach, but resisted deterministic models of relationality, and contrasted many of the models devised by contemporary psychiatry and sociology. Also in 1965, Schneemann executed a version of Allan Kaprow’s Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hofmann for Charlotte Moorman’s Third Annual New York Avant-​Garde Festival at the Judson Hall. Push and Pull was first presented in 1963 at the Santini brothers’ New York warehouse. It formed Kaprow’s contribution to the exhibition Hans Hofmann and His Students, selected by the Museum of Modern Art curator William C. Seitz. Within the warehouse, Kaprow constructed two rooms. In one, he amassed a disorderly hodgepodge of ‘items that might have been stored in an attic or basement –​ boxes, barrels, a ladder, old clothes, old newspapers, a broken television set’.21

Carolee Schneemann’s group work

The other was orderly and neat. Visitors were invited to move objects back and forth between the two, inhabiting them as they wished. Under Kaprow’s direction, participants faithfully adhered to these instructions. Schneemann’s iteration, however, released far more aggressive and unpredictable behaviour.22 During an intermission in the festival programme following a John Cage piece, Schneemann told attendees to go out and collect materials from the surrounding streets to fill the two ‘rooms’ for the Happening. Shortly afterwards, police arrived at the hall. The audience had ‘gone on a rampage, dragging trash cans from alleys, pulling hubcaps off cars, tearing at neon signs’.23 This loss of control prompted a shocked Schneemann to reflect that she needed to ‘find ways to sensitize people so that contact with each other, with environmental materials, was not an aggression but an extension of a sensitive, relational self ’.24 Through sensitisation, Schneemann aimed to find ways of countering violent, unproductive interaction, while acknowledging the presence of these dynamics within social exchange. The foundations for Schneemann’s transformation of the Happening into a vehicle for psychosensorial communication can be found in the earliest years of her practice, while she was a graduate student at the University of Illinois. During the summer of 1960, Schneemann created Labyrinth, which she subsequently came to understand as her first Happening.25 The action was catalysed by a storm, which caused an old tree outside the house Schneemann shared with her partner, the musician and composer James Tenney, to come crashing down. Schneemann observed as her cat Kitsch rapidly adapted to this new habitat, using the tree trunk and its tangle of branches as an impromptu bridge between the house and a surrounding field. Inspired by Kitsch’s example, Schneemann mapped a route around this terrain of fallen tree, land and stream. The artist invited a group of friends to traverse it in any way they desired, the only proviso being that ‘no one outside of the journey was to observe the passage of others. Except myself –​I returned to my small work room to watch through the window.’26 Labyrinth demanded that its participants suppress their reliance on visual perception in favour of sensory connection. In a written account of the piece, Schneemann’s notations as observer merge with empathetic imaginative projections of their experiences: ‘each movement of the person ahead, accompanying sound, informs me of my next situation. She steps into oozing mud, throws out her arm to a steadying branch, suddenly ducks under thorny brush, straightens up to determine her direction, takes her time clambering up to the rocks.’27 Through sensitisation to others and the surrounding environment, individuals became joined in shared movement, receiving and acting on signals from others, while transmitting information in turn. The action ended with a barbeque at a rock pit in the garden, where people were encouraged to discuss their joint adventure:  ‘I wanted them to feel it, to really have to

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use their bodies/​to experience it/​–​communality/​share same physical efforts.’28 Schneemann’s scrutiny of reflex bodily action –​a hand thrown out in startled response to the sudden encounter between warm flesh and cold, wet, slippery mud  –​echoes Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic account of the trial-​and-​error mechanism involved in attempting to pick up a cigar, offering a comparable object lesson in responsive feedback.29 Anticipating the contact exercises that would come to form the backbone of Schneemann’s group work, Labyrinth was in essence an adaptation study, but of interpersonal relations rather than of the behaviour of an individual, isolated organism. In his 1964 essay ‘The Logical Categories of Learning and Communication’, Bateson expanded on the concerns he and Ruesch had elaborated in Communication. He described how ‘all species of behavioral scientists are concerned with “learning” in one sense or another of that word. Moreover, since “learning” is a communicational phenomenon, all are affected by that cybernetic revolution in thought which has occurred in the last twenty-​five years.’30 As Bateson acknowledged, his understanding of psychosocial communication as a relationally networked process was indebted to Wiener.31 Cybernetics was concerned with ‘the theory of prediction and of the construction of apparatus to embody these theories’.32 Such predictive apparatuses would function through the fusion of communication with control mechanisms, resulting in the successful delivery of messages through efficient feedback. In developing self-​ correcting computing devices, Wiener looked to the human brain.33 While warning against insisting ‘too strongly on the brain as a glorified digital machine’, Wiener anticipated the overlaps among cybernetics, psychology and psychotherapy.34 The Macy Conferences were a manifestation of this conviction that ‘he who studies the nervous system cannot forget the mind, and he who studies the mind cannot forget the nervous system’.35 However, despite the interdisciplinary nature of cybernetics, Wiener remained sceptical about its transferability into the social sciences.36 Inspired by the focus on communication in cybernetics, sociologists and psychologists like Bateson started to diverge from its originary emphasis on control, taking its precepts into the places from which Wiener retreated.37 N. Katherine Hayles notes that Wiener was anxious that the extension of cybernetics into sociology would erode the concept of the individual liberal subject.38 While Schneemann was only too aware of the exclusions upon which the liberal subject rested, she also resisted mechanistic understandings of social interaction. As such, her work participates actively in communication theory’s on-​going struggle to navigate the relationship between embodied subject and social structure. There were strongly therapeutic, psychologically inflected elements to Labyrinth, which developed out of Schneemann’s experience of feeling ‘devastated’ about the destruction of the ‘beautiful tree’, and the ‘domestic

Carolee Schneemann’s group work

upheaval/​disarrangement’ this wreaked.39 The experience was a ‘communal, ritualistic’ one, in which the ‘mind takes its cues from the situation of the body’, and an individual problem addressed collectively.40 Steve Joshua Heims notes in his history of the Macy Conferences that, for Bateson and others, cybernetics converged with the wider movement in psychiatry away from the Freudian focus on the individual subject, toward a growing fascination with interpersonal relations.41 Schneemann’s group work similarly turned its back on the psychoanalytic investment in one-​to-​one interlocution between analyst and patient, and adopted antihierarchical therapeutic structures.42 As the artist succinctly characterised her group work: ‘neo-​Freudianism was not where we pivoted’.43 Labyrinth also corresponds with attempts to account more readily for reflexivity within cybernetic discourse.44 The sensorial communication it envisaged embraced possibilities for growth instead of recursive cyclicality. While pursuing interpersonal connections, Schneemann preserved space for subjective agency and transformation. Rather than situating participants in established and predictable communication relays, Labyrinth encouraged them to start building responsive and elastic sensorial interactions within their environment. It anticipates the ecological scores designed by the dancer and choreographer Anna Halprin and her husband, the architect Lawrence Halprin, on the West Coast in the San Francisco Bay Area, notably the outdoor activities of their Summer Workshops in the late 1960s (Figure  3.2).45 More specifically, it reflects Schneemann’s enthusiasm for the psychoanalytic work of Wilhelm Reich, which was founded on the belief that ‘everything in nature is interconnected in one way or another’, and that the body’s ideal state is ‘unarmoured and therefore in contact with nature inside and outside’.46 For Reich, this was achieved primarily through orgasm. Schneemann’s erotic politics relate strongly to the controversial alternative models of therapeutic relation that Reich, departing from Freud, devised, the emphasis of which on release and commingling contrasted cybernetic preoccupations with prediction.47 The physical and psychological group dynamics that Schneemann sought to cultivate in Labyrinth informed other works, such as Newspaper Event (1963), a performance at the Judson Dance Theater.48 Newspaper Event was designed for eight people, with the main group comprising seven performers (including Yvonne Rainer and Deborah Hay), and the eighth role, the ‘Free Agent’, played by Schneemann. Each performer was ascribed the identity of a body part: spine, legs/​face, shoulders/​arms, neck/​feet, hands, head and fingers.49 The habitat Schneemann created for this body consisted of dense layers of crumpled newspaper.50 The performers were invited to immerse themselves in this malleable material, moving in ways that corresponded with their respective body part (Figure 3.3). The score gave prompts for individual actions.

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Lawrence and Anna Halprin, Blindfold Walk, 2 July 1968, from the Experiments in Environment Workshop, 1–​24 July 1968, Kentfield, California.

Carolee Schneemann’s group work

Carolee Schneemann, Newspaper Event, 29 January 1963, performance at the Judson Dance Theater, Judson Memorial Church, New York City, gelatin silver print, 8 in × 10 in (20.32 cm × 25.4 cm).

‘Hands’ were invited to make ‘a little something to wear from the newspapers’. ‘Fingers’, meanwhile, were told to ‘make a little something amusing from newspapers … do not show it. If anyone comes too close you call them “you little prick” or “you dumb ass”, in an impersonal way.’51 Newspaper Event staged the body as a composite organism informed by multiple sensorial conduits, a dispersed but networked entity. While composing the piece, Schneemann ‘was thinking of an organism interchanging its parts (phagocyte)’.52 A  phagocyte is a type of cell that can absorb, and also break down and decompose, solid particles, specifically bacteria and other cells. This revealing Reichian metaphor conveys the intense interrelation Schneemann desired to cultivate among her performers, their bodies and the environment. At the time of Labyrinth’s making in 1960, Schneemann primarily identified as a painter, even though she already thought of the medium as ‘a beloved corpse’.53 Schneemann retrospectively framed Labyrinth as a bridge between painting and performance, relating how, as she watched the movements of her friends from her vantage point inside the house, she imagined that they had ‘become the extension of my eye and arm –​are strokes of color, moving gesture and event on a canvas –​paradoxically an image and the process of imagery

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being created temporally’.54 It was only later when Schneemann heard about Kaprow that she felt she was ‘onto something’, but she ‘didn’t know what or where it would go’.55 Labyrinth and Newspaper Event represent early attempts to carve out space in the fields of Happenings and communications studies alike for alternative visions of psychosocial communality. The challenges that Schneemann encountered in doing so would grow as the 1960s progressed, sharpening the politics of her group work. Negative feedback Labyrinth and Newspaper Event contain in embryonic form concerns that Schneemann pursued in her sensitising group work and activities, particularly after her experience with Push and Pull. Yet if they converged at points with the models of interpersonal feedback promoted by the take-​up of cybernetics in sociology and psychology, by the mid-​to-​late 1960s Schneemann was increasingly sceptical about such discourses. These doubts received their most complex articulation in a Happening that Schneemann created in 1967 at the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, which took place at the Camden Town Roundhouse in London, from 15 to 30 July 1967. The Congress was organised by the Institute of Phenomenological Studies, which the psychiatrists Joseph Berke, R. D. Laing, Leon Redler and David Cooper had founded earlier that year. They aimed to confront the pathology of society, ‘to demystify all forms of human violence, and to collate, across international boundaries, the most advanced thought in the social and psychological sciences’.56 The Dialectics of Liberation Congress ultimately offered a vision of social interaction that prioritised individualism and focused on the issue of alienation. It was left to Schneemann to offer a different model of interpersonal sensitisation. The Congress’s interdisciplinary assault on ‘the sociological-​anthropological-​ psychological-​economic-​political mess we inhabit’ united a range of speakers from both sides of the Atlantic for two weeks of discussion and debate, including the anthropologist Jules Henry; the Digger Emmett Grogan; the Frankfurt School theorist Herbert Marcuse; the Black Power advocate Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), who had recently stepped down as head of the Student Non-​Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); and the poet Allen Ginsberg.57 Its focus on violence was partly spurred by the success of the Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) in London between 9 and 11 September 1966. This had brought together artists working in performance, including Gustav Metzger, Yoko Ono, John Latham and Al Hansen, with speakers from  politics, psychology and sociology, to address the symbiotic relationship  between creation and destruction.58 Berke had given a talk entitled ‘Man as a Self-​Destroying Art’, and his desire to secure Schneemann’s involvement in the Congress the following year seems to have been influenced

Carolee Schneemann’s group work

by his experience of the significant contribution made by Happenings to the earlier event, as well as his friendship with Schneemann.59 The US artist Hansen provided another link between Schneemann and DIAS. A notebook Schneemann kept during her visit to London in 1967, which contains preparatory studies for Round House, includes a map signed by Hansen condensing the city into a few key countercultural locations: the Biba Boutique, Indica Gallery and Better Books, all radiating outward from the hub of Piccadilly Circus.60 In contrast to DIAS, however, Schneemann was the only visual artist who created a work in 1967, although practitioners including Metzger, Latham and Barbara Steveni attended the Congress, and Ginsberg gave a reading.61 This, coupled with her status as a woman artist in an extremely male-​dominated environment, led her to feel isolated from proceedings, a subject of antipathy and even outright aggression. Schneemann’s Happening was scheduled for the penultimate night of the Congress on 29 July (Figure 3.4). The work lasted far longer than the one evening of public performance, however, encompassing the febrile interpersonal relations of the two-​week rehearsal period. The artist had always envisaged that the performance would act as a communications receptor, which would gather information during the event’s progress and feed it back at the end, resulting in a collaborative occupation of the cavernous Roundhouse using all of the speakers who were ‘willing’.62 But when Schneemann explained this intention to the assembled contributors, the novelist, psychotherapist and philosopher Paul Goodman leapt up and vociferously denounced her plan, declaring that he ‘objected to this event, that it would be intrusive and “we weren’t consulted about inviting her … why in the world would we want her to do this sort of thing?” ’63 Round House  –​the resulting Happening  –​thus emerged from a breakdown in interpersonal relations, and a point-​blank refusal on the part of some people to engage in communication. Although Schneemann’s experience of misogyny is not surprising, the resistance to her involvement in the Congress can still feel shocking, given her deep engagement with its purported concerns. The performances that Schneemann designed in the 1960s demonstrated a consistent attentiveness to violence and aggression in society, particularly in connection with the Vietnam War. As James Harding proposes in his account of Round House, Schneemann’s performance ‘exposed a repressive undercurrent in the assumptions about liberation that dominated the Congress’, revealing the inability among many of the speakers to consider gender in conjunction with class struggle.64 While I agree with Harding that Schneemann’s work offered a radical alternative to the New Left thinking expounded by other Congress participants, there were nonetheless significant affinities between her Happenings and the sociological and psychological communications theory that informed their debates.65 The situation was therefore one less of outright division than of multifaceted

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3.4 Carolee Schneemann, poster for Round House, July 1967, Happening at the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, Roundhouse, London.

interplay and critique from within. Goodman’s response completely missed the fact that the ‘sort of thing’ Schneemann was doing directly participated in a wider drive to reconceptualise communication beyond cybernetics. Schneemann’s initial enthusiasm for the Congress courses through the correspondence that she and Berke exchanged in the run-​up to the event. A  letter dated 15 June 1967 contains the eagerly posed questions:  ‘what will be the space? Is rehearsal time available?’, and specifying: ‘I also want to do

Carolee Schneemann’s group work

some “physical encounters” with Kingsley Hall people.’66 After spending part of his medical training in London, Berke returned to the city from the USA in 1965 to participate in the founding of Laing’s Kingsley Hall experiment in the East End.67 In contrast to traditional psychiatric institutions, Kingsley Hall was run as a commune with room for fourteen patients at any time.68 It was based on Laing’s doctrine of antipsychiatry, which approached violence in the individual as a manifestation of aggression within the familial group and, by extension, society as a whole. Viewed from this perspective, the categories of ‘madness’ and ‘sanity’ were revealed to be essentially arbitrary constructs produced by attempts to repress symptoms endemic to all members of society, not merely those designated ‘insane’. Laing moreover challenged the notion of the detached and objective analyst, arguing that any wish on the part of the psychiatrist to ‘confine himself to the “objectively” observable behaviour of the patient’ was an ‘impossible’, illusory fantasy.69 This refusal to pathologise mental illness and condemnation of traditional institutions cohered with Timothy Leary’s countercultural quest for alternative therapeutic methods. Andrew Pickering observes how the psychiatric take-​ up of cybernetics, exemplified by the rejection of clear dividing lines between ‘patient’ and ‘therapist’, correlated with the countercultural dissolution of fixed distinctions between subjects promoted by Leary.70 He traces the diffusion of cybernetic thought into Kingsley Hall through Laing’s transatlantic friendship with Bateson, arguing that their approaches converged in the notion of ‘the performative self ’. This constituted ‘a nonmodern self capable of strange performances and the achievement of altered states, including a pathological disintegration into madness in one direction, and a dissolution into nirvana on the other’.71 While Schneemann does not in the event seem to have worked directly with Kingsley Hall, and despite her aversion to Laing, his thinking formed an important reference point in Round House’s genesis.72 Although Schneemann failed to recruit any Congress speakers, she established a core cohort of performers. In counterpoint to the hostility emanating from the majority of invited speakers, alongside the discussions Schneemann attempted to instigate tactile, sensory and psychological connections among the members of her collective, approaching the Roundhouse as a ‘total environment’ and ‘a sensory arena in which to fuse/​focus certain sensory relationships centred on a particular group of people’.73 Using the contact exercises that she had spent much of the 1960s developing, Schneemann sought to establish physical and psychic communication channels that would enable connectivity, while fostering a granular sense of the individuals involved. The artist later characterised this process as follows: ‘we were evolving not simply a “performance”, but a microcosm of creative inter-​relations. Despite harassment and shortness of time, we were discovering a concrete clarification of the actual social situation, and a full self-​identity within a group process.’74 For

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Michael Kustow, a committed member of Schneemann’s troupe who would shortly become the director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), the ensuing experience bore out this aim, constituting a form of ‘therapeutic non-​ conformism’.75 This underscores how Schneemann’s emphasis on the importance of shared consciousness and sensitisation in the Happening echoed the therapeutic model developed at Kingsley Hall, whereby analyst and patient underwent a transformative experience together. In a book coauthored with Mary Barnes about her admittance into Kingsley Hall to work through a period of psychosis, Berke’s approach reflects the extent to which antipsychiatry applied a cybernetic framework to schizophrenia, conceptualising it as the result of miscommunication:  ‘in all cases where one or more family members had been labelled “schizophrenic” a unique pattern of communication could be made out. People did not talk to each other, but at each other, and tangentially, not directly.’76 Schneemann’s focus on effective physical and psychological communication, and her vision of the group as an interconnected organism, sought to counter the alienation and interpersonal barriers associated with psychosis in antipsychiatry. However, for all Schneemann’s movement away from Freudianism, the psychosocial therapeutic model offered by Round House also differed from the emphasis on ‘interlaced patterns of control, frequently violent control’ and negative codependence within antipsychiatry.77 The result was a Happening that offered its own particular refutation of the cybernetic connection between communication and control. Cybernetic thought was most explicitly foregrounded at the Congress in Bateson’s contribution:  a lecture entitled ‘Conscious Purpose versus Nature’. Bateson argued that the Congress was fundamentally concerned with three types of interrelated cybernetic system: the ‘human individual’, encompassing both ‘physiology and neurology’; the ‘society in which that individual lives’; and finally the wider ecosystem, ‘the natural biological surroundings of these human animals’.78 On the one hand, Schneemann’s group work might have been said to present precisely the kind of open system that cybernetically informed sociology and psychology advocated, in contrast to the homeostasis of the closed feedback loop. It experimented with ‘the uneasy balance of dependency and competition’ identified by Bateson within biological systems, particularly what he described as the ‘physiological competition and mutual dependency among the organs, tissues, cells and so on’.79 On the other, Schneemann attempted to leave competition, controlled aggression and anxiety behind in a manner that bordered on utopianism.80 Laing spent his presentation bemoaning how ‘the study of social events presents an almost insurmountable difficulty, in that their visibility … is very low’.81 Lamenting the challenge faced by the analyst in identifying problems of interpersonal communication in the first place, Laing argued that ‘the

Carolee Schneemann’s group work

intelligibility of social events requires that they be always seen in a context that extends both spatially and in time’, oblivious to the fact that Schneemann was conducting just such an investigation of the social events at the Roundhouse under his very nose.82 In transforming the Happening into Kinetic Theatre, Schneemann was concerned with ‘literal dimensionality and varied media in radical juxtaposition’.83 The artist worked ‘with untrained people and various waste materials to realize images which range from the banal to the fantastic –​ images which dislocate, disassociate, compound and engage our senses’, creating environments in which ‘a shifting scale of tactile, plastic, physical encounters’ could be realised.84 These encounters exposed and confronted ‘a social range of current cultural taboos and repressive conventions’, enacting a critique that, as Round House demonstrates, extended to the disciplines of sociology and psychology.85 Schneemann’s group exploration of interpersonal relations achieved what the sociologists and psychologists could not, putting theory into practice and questioning the deterministic ends toward which apparently radical approaches to interaction such as antipsychiatry might tend. Communication breakdown The final Happening on the evening of 29 July homed in on these concerns. Schneemann had intended to open the performance by leading the audience into the darkened space using a rope aisle, strung between the pillars of the Roundhouse.86 This was evidently intended to disorientate, but also to induce a frisson of theatrical expectation. Schneemann pictured ‘darkness, flashing lights … figures on cycles gliding by, in and out swoosh, shift ropes & re-​route spectators; light events flutter around them, work crews running in [sic] balcony, calling signals’.87 Unfortunately, on the night heavy rain meant these plans had to be abandoned in order to get the audience into the building quickly. Round House instead began with the performers entering with a horse cart (a reference to the rag-​and-​bone trade in London during the 1960s, a custom that fascinated Schneemann) loaded with rubbish and detritus (Figure 3.5).88 Although not realised in full, the plans for the opening manifested the Happening’s concern with the relay of signals, together with its treatment of effective transmission –​and the potential for misunderstanding and confusion –​as dependent on context as well as content.89 After dispersing the rubbish around the central space, Schneemann’s performers executed actions that included slathering their limbs in grease, moulding each other’s features into mask-​like formations with face-​paint and wrapping their bodies in skins of aluminium foil, so that they looked like creatures that had escaped from a schlocky sci-​fi B-​movie. Each of these activities mimicked the alienation from the self –​the feeling of displacement, of self as object  –​that Laing identified as components of schizophrenia.90

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3.5 Carolee Schneemann, Round House, July 1967, Happening at the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, Roundhouse, London. Photograph by Michael Broome.

However, they also read as parodic hyperinflations of Laing’s notion of the ‘divided self ’, which the ethos of connectivity and physical communality in Round House countered. Individual performers became entangled within a gigantic cat’s cradle of intertwined strands of material in a dynamic, transient moment of interrelation. In one photograph (Figure 3.6), it is difficult to discern where one body ends and another begins, or the points at which skin becomes paper, straw or cloth. It captures a moment in the crystallisation of a larger structure; for all the apparent chaos of Schneemann’s collaged environment, the performers were engaged in creating patterns of movement and intelligible modes of communication. Like Labyrinth and Newspaper Event,

Carolee Schneemann’s group work

Carolee Schneemann, Round House, 1967, Happening at the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, Roundhouse, London. Photograph by Leena Komppa.

the performance demarcated a distinct zone of sensory and psychological interrelation, whereby an alternative community could be realised, if only briefly. As in Night Crawlers at Expo ’67, Round House incorporated a ‘newsreel’ of disaster footage, and Viet-​Flakes (1965), a film Schneemann composed by passing a 16mm camera over press photographs of atrocities committed in Vietnam (Figure 3.7).91 Round House culminated with the latter projected across the bodies of the performers as they lay in the rubble that flooded the central space. In a similar manner to Snows from earlier in 1967, this established a connection between their bodies and the victims of the military conflict waged by the USA, and, by extension, the audience who witnessed the flickering images.92 Finally, the group gathered themselves up and left the stage, some of them inside the cart, others pulling it. A band called the Social Deviants entered and started playing ‘up on a load of planks and steel girders, thrashing through this appalling set’, providing an anarchic end to the performance as participants and audience united to dance in the sea of waste.93 Gene Youngblood included Schneemann in his psychedelic 1970 account of the way in which decentralised cybernetic networks of media communication were increasing leisure time and establishing a ‘collective consciousness’.94 Expanded Cinema discusses Schneemann’s work –​specifically her erotic film Fuses, in which she filmed herself and Tenney having sex –​under the rubric of ‘synaesthetic cinema’. Youngblood defined this as:

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3.7 Carolee Schneemann, Viet-​Flakes, 1965, DVD of toned black-​and-​white original 16mm film. the only aesthetic language suited to the post-​industrial, post-​literate, man-​ made environment with its multidimensional simulsensory network of information sources. It’s the only aesthetic tool that even approaches the reality continuum of conscious existence in the nonuniform, nonlinear, nonconnected electronic atmosphere of the Paleocybernetic Age.95

‘Synaesthetic cinema’ might –​admittedly to very different ends –​equally be said to apply to Schneemann’s use of atrocity images in Viet-​Flakes, through which she hoped to sensitise the audience to the political situation in Vietnam, and incite them to react against it.96 Schneemann’s screening of Viet-​Flakes during Round House turned cybernetic communication back on itself, taking a military discourse developed to increase the accuracy of missiles and instead using it to implement feedback systems that were committedly antiwar. The tension between Schneemann’s approach and the ideas propounded at the Dialectics of Liberation Congress became most apparent in a section of the Happening that reperformed the rifts among the social scientists, psychologists and psychiatrists, using notes Schneemann had collated reproducing snatches of the debates that she was able to attend between rehearsals.97 Schneemann later observed that, even before she arrived at the Congress, her ‘hope was to absorb a lot of the language, the linguistics, the verbal structures

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that were going to be in the discussions’.98 This aim, she believed, explained why some speakers resented her performance, as they were worried that their words would be taken out of context.99 Faced with the communication impasse between herself and the other speakers, this is exactly what Schneemann did, jotting down fragments of conversation for her Happening: in a very centralized basis the second characteristic of the system is its complexity it can be seen in many ways as its Achilles heel this creates internal convolutions in the system this has kind of amazing ramifications it is no longer a production economy but a consumption economy you have this huge surplus upon which the whole internal consumption of the state exists   increasing specialization   bureaucratization advance of technology100

These phrases, vocalised by participants as they interacted in their debris-​filled environment, echo Bateson’s discussion of environmental ecosystems, and Marcuse’s speech on ‘Liberation from the Affluent Society’, which condensed the indictment of bureaucratised, commoditised society in his books Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-​Dimensional Man (1964).101 Regurgitated by the performers as they scrabbled around wearing increasingly grubby underwear, emulating the aggressive oratorical gestures they had observed (Figure  3.8), the proclamations of the Congress speakers disintegrated into incoherence. As such, Round House reperformed the logistical as well as conceptual communication difficulties that plagued the Congress. Peace News reported that disagreements between the organisers regarding the management of the question-​ and-​ answer sessions, combined with a lack of functioning microphones, resulted in ‘little real communication’.102 Schneemann’s Round House notes damningly capture this: Will you just let me finish I’m not finished You’re not listening You’re not listening I will not step down until I’ve finished Can you hear me? Can you hear me?103

While some lauded the Congress as a vital manifestation of the counterculture, others were disappointed by what they saw as a series of rambling, exclusory discussions.104 Schneemann’s Happening addressed the limitations of verbal communication in favour of tactile relations, proposing that action and gesture

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3.8 Carolee Schneemann, Round House, 1967, Happening at the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, Roundhouse, London. Photograph by Michael Broome.

could lead to therapeutic and psychological effects just as much as, if not more so than, linguistic exchange. Perhaps the most important aspect of Schneemann’s departure from the model of cybernetic networked relationality that underpinned the Congress was her group work’s engagement with the specificities of embodied experience.

Carolee Schneemann’s group work

Carolee Schneemann, Round House, 1967, Happening at the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, Roundhouse, London. Photograph by John Haynes.

The political ramifications of Schneemann’s physically and psychologically integrated communications model are illustrated in an image from Round House that shows the artist engaging in a contact relation exercise with Henry Martin (Figure 3.9). Schneemann kneels on the floor, her back slightly arched and her right arm extending gracefully behind her. Martin stands over her, cradling her head with one hand and moulding her face with the other. The shutter has fallen at the precise moment when his left arm creates a continuous line with Schneemann’s extended one, resulting in a fleeting, fluid arabesque whereby their white and black bodies combine to execute one joint movement. Other photographs from Round House show similar moments of interpersonal congruency (Figure 3.10). Round House was performed the same year

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Carolee Schneemann, Round House, 1967, Happening at the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, Roundhouse, London. Photograph by Michael Broome.

as the lawsuit Loving v. Virginia in the USA, in which Mildred and Richard Loving successfully brought a case against the state of Virginia’s attempts to prevent interracial marriage, thereby ending race-​based laws against the institution. For Schneemann, Round House attempted to establish ‘personal and inter-​racial equalities, collaborative responsibility, a coordinated expressive system’.105 The Happening did not offer homogeneous connectivity, but an awareness of difference and divergence within networks, resulting from sensitivity to the lived experiences of gendered and racialised bodies. This resonated with Carmichael’s appearance at the Congress, which was a significant event for black British attendees, particularly in terms of his refutation of the individualised notions of alienation put forward by other speakers.106 Carmichael later recalled his shock on arriving at the Roundhouse. He had been expecting an ‘ “international” gathering of leading revolutionary thinkers and activists, discussing issues and approaches pertaining to struggles for liberation across the globe’, but instead found that the speakers were ‘European leftists, literally, to a man, heavily “theoretical” … weighted toward intellectuals and academics’.107 The presentations ‘tended toward abstract psychology’ and focused on ‘ “alienation” and the “individual”, the psychological “dialectic”

Carolee Schneemann’s group work

of individual liberation’ (italics in original).108 Carmichael’s speech directly countered this: ‘I think it’s a cop out when people talk about the individual. What we’re talking about around the US today, and I believe around the Third World, is the system of international white supremacy coupled with international capitalism.’109 The Congress, however, was a case of ‘business as usual among white bourgeois intellectuals even when they call themselves revolutionary’.110 Schneemann recognised both the whiteness of the programme and the corrective to it that Carmichael offered, noting the energising effect of his presence: ‘the white audience seems astonished, moved; the London Black Panthers keep saying “they’ve got us so contained we can’t begin a program to even communicate among ourselves” … So that the politics of self-​determination seems like a luxury import!’111 Carmichael and Schneemann may not have come into direct contact at the Congress, but it is striking that Carmichael also felt ‘like a footnote’.112 His sense of marginalisation as ‘a token representative of black struggle’, and Schneemann’s exclusion on the grounds of her gender, pointed to the potential of intersectional solidarity between feminism and civil rights, as well as the difficulties and challenges of this, both dynamics that Schneemann’s Round House Happening addressed.113 Schneemann’s attempt to preserve forms of relationality that encompass and respect the distinctions of lived experience, and refuse to standardise them into predictable patterns, is encapsulated in her poetic ‘Notes of Motion’: PHYSICAL ACTION is an assertion of place time commitment of gesture posture is a statement gesture is a biological historical compendium of intention an involuntary confession a generous plea (underlying) is cultural compendium of intention to communicate (even repressed, buried displacements) we tell everything essential to our natures by stance, gesture we pretend we’ve forgotten how ‘to read’ the involuntary information to allow manoeuvrability of social masks.114

This vision of interpersonal relations is far from biologically deterministic. For all her favouring of Reich over Freud, Schneemann’s use of the word ‘repressed’ and her evocation of ‘buried dynamics’ indicates a psychoanalytic understanding of the role played by unconscious drives in comportment and interaction. The subjects imagined in Schneemann’s writings and performances are multifaceted, formed at the intersection of history, culture and psychology. Their actions and gestures result from sediment-​like layers of experience and memories –​or, in the artist’s words, a ‘compendium of intention to communicate’ –​that testify to a view of interrelation in which individual specificity is retained. This embodied conceptualisation of communication diverges markedly from cybernetics. N.  Katherine Hayles has charted how, while first-​order cybernetics was primarily concerned with homeostasis –​the maintenance of

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a constant state  –​second-​order cybernetic thinking centred on the idea of reflexivity, which ‘confuses and entangles the boundaries we impose on the world’.115 This is certainly the model of cybernetics taken up by Bateson, and that fed into antipsychiatry.116 Yet Hayles notes that the informational emphasis of cybernetics led to the systematic downplaying and even erasure of the body, ‘in ways that have not occurred in other critiques of the liberal humanist subject, especially in feminist and postcolonial theories’.117 The body and its lived experience, together with sensitivity to how notions of race and gender might both shape that experience and be confronted through it, remained central to Schneemann’s work in a way that diverges from the posthuman implications of cybernetics.118 Round House proposed that psychosocial relations had to involve sensitisation to other people and the environment. Schneemann’s group works mimicked the language of psychotherapeutic communication, but, despite moments of conjunction and overlap with contemporary sociological and psychological approaches to interpersonal relations, redeployed these discourses to their own ends. From countercultural to feminist consciousness raising Thames Crawling, presented at the 1970 London International Underground Film Festival, was Schneemann’s last group work. The intertwined, naked forms of eight participants moved through the audience, mingling with pneumatic inflatables designed by John Lifton.119 As in previous group performances, Schneemann screened Fuses and Viet-​Flakes over her participants, as well as recordings of Meat Joy, Snows and Water Light/​Water Needle. Thames Crawling offered a miniature retrospective of Schneemann’s oeuvre to date, but it was also one of her more anarchic and unstructured performances, reflecting her immersion in the London counterculture toward the beginning of a stay in the city that lasted four years.120 Yet Schneemann’s work retained a political commitment that sometimes came into conflict with the elements of the alternative artistic and cultural scene that were more concerned with individual consciousness expansion. This is vividly illustrated by Schneemann’s return to the Roundhouse in 1970 as a contributor to a benefit event for the Chicago Eight, which descended into chaos when someone spiked the drinks with LSD.121 As Schneemann reflected in Rolling Stone: the English contingent wanted to get stoned and go lightfoot and one rock group after another [sic]. Their idea was: get your head in the right place and evil things will go away. But I feel that societal problems are on the back of their necks and that they’re on tiptoe, just missing the hot air. Gaseous, oppressive forces are all around, and everyone is so vulnerable.122

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At the Roundhouse, ‘the depoliticized people won’; as Schneemann matter-​of-​ factly observed, ‘you can’t have an acid process exist with a revolutionary process as we know it’.123 The retrospective quality of Thames Crawling indicates that Schneemann was desirous to draw her group work to an end, not only because of the demanding energy levels required, but also perhaps because, at the burnt-​out end of the 1960s, it was time for new means of interpersonal relation. The projects Schneemann pursued in London during the early 1970s manifest a move from countercultural consciousness exploration and group encounter therapy to communication with more identifiably feminist ends. This mirrors a wider trend traced by Debra Michals, who notes that ‘while few feminists had been hippies, the trajectory that the new women’s movement took, its experience with the mainstreaming of its core ideas and strategies, and most of all, its emphasis on a politics of the conscious self overlap greatly with those of traditionally defined counterculture groups’.124 Feminist consciousness raising sessions, in which women shared their experiences and, in doing so, connected seemingly private problems with overarching systemic and structural inequalities, took the ‘consciousness expansion without a politics’ promoted by the counterculture, and transformed it into an activist tool.125 Schneemann’s group work, although it involved men and women, trialled a form of consciousness raising that was closely attuned to the politics of particularised bodies and their encounters in the world, as well as the links between specific experiences and the wider social system. Both considerations would hold central roles in feminist artistic experiments.126 This has parallels with Kaprow’s movement into interpersonal research during the 1970s, which he acknowledged deployed ‘the form of a group of people sitting around in a circle and sharing their personal experience, without being interrupted or challenged’, adopted from ‘feminist consciousness raising’.127 Yet while Kaprow’s later performances exhibited a greater awareness of the gendered divisions of everyday life in contrast to the overtly sexist treatment of women performers in his early work, his engagement with consciousness raising remained at a relatively superficial formalist level in comparison to Schneemann’s concertedly feminist collectivity. One of Schneemann’s projects from the early 1970s that forcefully demonstrates this is her Sexual Parameters Survey, a version of which appeared in her Parts of a Body House Book (1972), published by the Beau Geste Press (Figure  3.11).128 Neither the Sexual Parameters Survey nor Parts of a Body House Book is a performance as such, but they were connected to Schneemann’s prior work in Kinetic Theatre. The Sexual Parameters Survey replicated a sociological questionnaire, promising ‘to actually graph the parameters in love-​making’.129 As well as recording aspects of her own sexual encounters, Schneemann collated reports from around forty other women,

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3.11 Carolee Schneemann, Sexual Parameters Survey, in Parts of a Body House Book, 1972, artist’s book, 33 cm × 20.3 cm, 66 pages, published by the Beau Geste Press, Cullompton, Devon, and Felipe Ehrenberg.

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integrating their responses into a collective portrait of physical and emotional experience ‘completely from a woman’s viewpoint’.130 The survey was inspired by Schneemann’s discovery as she began to ‘interview various women friends’ that ‘even in a deep love relationship they often suffered from subtle hostilities, restraints expressed by their partners’.131 The artist became convinced that women ‘haven’t found language for our own sensations and must do so’.132 Her interviewees relayed information that Schneemann arranged within a table, covering everything from genital size and the nature of the acquaintance, to whether or not sadism had been present during sex. Columns veered from specificities that could in theory have been verifiable, to subjective impressions of whether or not, for example, there was an element of fear latent in the man’s attitude toward the woman.133 In the Sexual Parameters Survey, ostensibly objective data and the intensely personal experience of desire brush against and destabilise each other. While the version in Parts of a Body House Book combines handwritten and typed text, the irony involved in attempting a bureaucratic survey of this transgressive material –​ transgressive in light of its acknowledgement and celebration of women’s sexual agency  –​becomes especially pronounced in typed iterations that invoke the dry tabulations of Conceptual art (Figures 3.12 and 3.13).134 In these charts, the body’s compulsions, as well as its capacity for violence, disrupt the painstakingly composed lines of type that try to contain the accounts of multiple sexual encounters, highlighting the way in which the drives might course through and frustrate neat sociological conclusions.135 Like Newspaper Event, the Sexual Parameters Survey presents the body as multiple, offering a composite testimony of women’s experience at the sharp end of sexual politics in the early 1970s. Parts of a Body House Book was another manifestation of the stock-​taking that Schneemann was conducting at this moment in her career. It gathered together writings with collaged materials, cuttings and handmade stencils relating to previous works, enabling ‘a releasing of the recent past into the present’.136 While the communication explored in Labyrinth and Round House was intimate but not necessarily sexual, the vision of the subject propounded by Parts of a Body House Book was overwhelmingly linked to erotic politics, as demonstrated by a series of related watercolour drawings Schneemann made during the mid-​to-​late 1960s titled Parts of a Body House. These depict a gigantic body through which tiny figures cavort, entering the worm-​like cavities of the ‘guerrilla gut room’, and standing on the threshold of the ‘genitals playroom’, which is stuffed with dismembered orifices including erect penises and pneumatic breasts. Some of these paintings, notably one in which various genitals are hooked up to projector-​like machines that control their movements (Figure  3.14), have a nightmarish quality, presenting a deeply negative vision of cybernetically programmed desire that the feminist consciousness raising mapped by the Sexual Parameters Survey counters.

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Carolee Schneemann, Sexual Parameters Chart II (Original) (Ye Olde Sex Chart), 1969, titled, dated, signed on reverse, type and pen on paper, 7 3/4 in × 24 in (19.69 cm × 60.96 cm).

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3.13 Carolee Schneemann, Sexual Parameters Chart III (Original) (Ye Olde Sex Chart), 1971, titled, dated, signed on reverse, type and pen on paper, 8 in × 27 in (20.32 cm × 68.58 cm).

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3.14 Carolee Schneemann, Parts of a Body House –​Genitals Playroom I (a), 1966, watercolour and ink on paper, 23 1/4 in × 26 1/2 in (59.1 cm × 67.3 cm).

The Sexual Parameters Survey finds its visual analogue in Portrait Partials (1970), a grid of black-​and-​white photographs zooming in on segments of the body (Figure 3.15). In each image, the camera concentrates on a corporeal fragment, sometimes coming so close that the lens has been unable to focus properly. Although elements remain identifiable –​the tip of a nipple, the flare of a nostril –​the patterns and echoes established across the grid collapse the images together and prompt uncertainty about what exactly is being shown and seen. Portrait Partials invokes the rationalising logic of the grid in conjunction with the photographic surveillance of the body, only to unsettle both regimes.137 It is difficult to tell how many people make up this ‘portrait’. Bellybuttons, slightly open mouths, anuses, and male and female genitalia start to blur together disconcertingly but also productively, decoupling sex and gender and presenting a nonbinary vision of sexual identity. This recalls the merging, composite bodies in Schneemann’s performances and drawings, whereby the subject undergoes a splitting that results in proliferation rather than diminution.

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Carolee Schneemann, Portrait Partials, 1970/​2007, thirty-​five gelatin silver prints, 37 1/2 in × 38 1/4 in (95.25 cm × 97.16 cm). Edition of eight copies.

Although the Sexual Parameters Survey takes a heteronormative view of sexual relations –​it makes no space for lesbian or queer sexualities, while the question of race is not raised at all, suggesting an assumed whiteness on the part of interviewees and objects of study alike  –​its sex-​positive exposition from women’s perspectives, and Schneemann’s collaborative way of working, are nonetheless subversive. The Sexual Parameters Survey provides a record of feminist consciousness raising, in which multiple perspectives unite on the page to enable the assessment of women’s sexual experiences and the extrapolation of shared findings that might lift individual understanding into collective collateral.138 Schneemann’s transformation of the survey into a consciousness-​raising device resonates with other collaborative works created in Britain during the early 1970s, notably the employment of sociological methodologies by

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Margaret Harrison, Kay Hunt and Mary Kelly during their investigation into gendered labour conditions for Women and Work: A Document on the Division of Labour in Industry 1973–​75 (1973–​75).139 This study of women workers at a metal-​box factory in Bermondsey, south London, explored the implementation and effects of the Equal Pay Act of 1970. In the words of Rosalind Delmar, it used what could be described as the ‘tools in trade of the historian, the sociologist, the trades union militant or the women’s liberation activist’ to combine video, recorded interviews, documentation of the legislation, photographs of the women labourers and schedules of their working days.140 The latter in particular powerfully expose the phenomenon influentially identified by the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild as the ‘second shift’, whereby women wage-​labourers have historically also conducted the majority of unwaged domestic and care work in the home.141 The Wages for Housework campaign of the 1970s in Europe and North America emphasised that this labour was as fundamental as waged work to the reproduction of capital, and critiqued how it had been occluded within Marxist analyses.142 While the Sexual Parameters Survey and Women and Work have very different intentions and political concerns, both wield sociological study as a feminist tool that can expose gendered inequalities.143 Rather than the Marxist materialism of Women and Work, however, Scheemann’s movement from countercultural to feminist consciousness raising has more in common with the sociological engagements that shaped the practice of Susan Hiller, who had also moved from the USA to the UK in the early 1970s.144 During this period, Hiller created a number of group works, including Street Ceremonies and Dream Mapping (both 1973). These drew on her training in anthropology, but developed its methods into an idiosyncratic, self-​reflexive form of participant-​observation aimed at consciousness raising. Street Ceremonies was a communal performance in London ‘inspired by traditions of the artist as map-​maker, a cosmologist as well as a cartographer’, and also a desire ‘to dance the boundaries of the neighbourhood’ on the autumn equinox.145 Participants had to communicate with each other from their positions in the street, using mirrors to reflect the sunlight and ‘draw’ a collective circle about half a mile in diameter. Dream Mapping focused even more explicitly on subjective experience and the power of shared self-​reflexivity. During this group research initiative, women created elaborate logbooks recording their dreams. On one evening, they slept together outside in a field that contained clusters of mushrooms known as ‘fairy rings’. The following day, each created a dream map, and these were then assembled and overlaid one on top of the other, in a similar way to Schneemann’s gathering of information for her Sexual Parameters Survey. Schneemann stopped making Kinetic Theatre in 1970, indicating that, by this point, the Happening’s potentialities as a communications tool had come

Carolee Schneemann’s group work

to an end for her. However, the investigations of interrelation that the artist pioneered during the 1960s, which drew on but resisted contemporaneous modes of sociological and psychological study, continued to inform the consciousness raising that became a crucial element of feminist art production during the 1970s. In engaging dialogically with sociological and psychological studies of communication, Schneemann resisted determinist behavioural models in favour of an organic approach to relationship formation. The communication strategies of later feminist works built on the dynamics of sensitisation and awareness that Schneemann had explored since Labyrinth, but developed them in an increasingly politicised direction. This shift comparably shaped the work of Lea Lublin, the focus of the final chapter. Notes 1 For Schneemann’s visceral response to Oldenburg’s installation environment on East 2nd Street in New York City, which he populated with his plaster and chicken-​ wire sculptures, see Carolee Schneemann, ‘About Claes Oldenburg’s Store, March 1961’, in More than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings, ed. Bruce R.  McPherson (Kingston, NY:  Documentext, 1997 [1979]), 15–​16. Schneemann described Kinetic Theatre as ‘my development of the “Happening” in America in the past 5 years’ in Carolee Schneemann, untitled notes relating to Round House, n.d., Box 22, Folder 6, Carolee Schneemann Papers (950001), Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. 2 In her infamous ‘unsent’ letter to Allan Kaprow, in which she memorably characterises her position in the 1960s as ‘Cunt Mascot on the men’s art team’, Schneemann also refers to her experience of alienation during Happening & Fluxus as a key source of disillusionment. Carolee Schneemann, ‘From an Unsent Letter to Allan Kaprow’ (1974), in More than Meat Joy, 195–8 (196). Kenneth White notes that Schneemann’s contribution to the exhibition, the Electronic Activation Room (1970), contained ‘a poignant atomization of her résumé’, with photographic documentation from works including Meat Joy (1964) and Snows (1967) projected from 35mm slide carousels and 16mm film projectors. Kenneth White, ‘Meat System in Cologne’, Art Journal 74, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 56–​77 (69). Schneemann’s attempt to bring the longer history of her work into view exemplifies what Martha Barratt pinpoints as the ‘auto-​archival’ aspect of her oeuvre, which can be read as a feminist commitment to documenting women’s artistic production in the face of institutional amnesia. Martha Barratt, ‘Autobiography, Time, and Documentation in the Performances and Auto-​Archives of Carolee Schneemann’, Visual Resources 32, nos 3–​4 (2016): 282–​305 (283). 3 While Kaprow received his first retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1967, Schneemann had to wait far longer for institutional recognition. In 1996 the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York presented Carolee Schneemann: Up to and Including Her Limits. This was followed by Carolee Schneemann: Within and

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Beyond the Premises at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz in 2010; and Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting of 2015, which travelled from the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg to venues including MoMA PS1, New  York. In 2017 Schneemann was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale. 4 Carolee Schneemann, interview by Kate Haug (1977), in Carolee Schneemann, Imaging Her Erotics:  Essays, Interviews, Projects (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 2002), 21–​44 (28). 5 For key writings on Meat Joy and Fuses, see Rachel Middleman, ‘Performing Eros:  Carolee Schneemann’, in Radical Eroticism:  Women, Art, and Sex in the 1960s (Oakland:  University of California Press, 2018), 33–​63; Alyce Mahon, ‘The Domestic as Erotic Rite in the Art of Carolee Schneemann’, Oxford Art Journal 40, no. 1 (May 2017): 49–​64; Elise Archias, The Concrete Body: Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, Vito Acconci (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016): 77–​121; and Ara Osterweil, ‘Carolee Schneemann: Meat Joys’, in Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Turn in American Avant-​Garde Film (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2014), 136–​76. On the unevenness of Schneemann’s historical reception, see Martin Sundberg, ‘A One-​Work-​Artist? Carolee Schneemann and the Reception of Her Work’, Konsthistorisk tidskrift/​Journal of Art History 80, no. 3 (2011): 168–​79. 6 On the history of the Judson Dance Theater, see Sally Banes, Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–​1964 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). 7 Schneemann described her group as being ‘like animals’, evoking a far more experimental, loose and countercultural set of affiliations than that of the dance world. Carolee Schneemann, interview by David Mayor, n.d., audiocassette tape, TGA815/​ 1/​11/​3, Mayor/​Fluxshoe/​Beau Geste Press (BGP) Archive, Tate Archive, Tate Britain, London. 8 Carolee Schneemann, ‘From “Notes of Motion 1966–​68” ’, in More than Meat Joy, 185–​9  (189). 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Carolee Schneemann, untitled statement in Contemporary Artists, ed. Colin Naylor and Genesis P-​Orridge (London: St James Press, 1977), 857. 12 These exercises were moreover closely connected to antiwar protest, with Schneemann recounting how: ‘the cultural symptoms of frustration and anger over the Vietnam war increased as we confronted the unsuitability of our own behavior to the conditions affecting us … in ’67, ’68 I did a series of public workshops with the expectation that what we learned in theater could be of use in mass actions’. Schneemann, ‘From “Notes of Motion 1966–​68” ’, 188. 13 For an example of the wider take-​up of contact improvisation within the art world, particularly in the realm of postmodern dance, see the accounts of comparable group sensitisation exercises in Steve Paxton, Daniel Lepkoff, David Woodberry, Laura Chapman, Karen Radler, Annette La Rocque and Scott Jones, ‘Contact Improvisation’, Avalanche (Summer 1975): 24–​5.

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14 Of particular relevance, White offers a cybernetic reading of what he identifies as Schneemann’s ‘libidinal engineering’ (italics in original). White, ‘Meat System in Cologne’, 57. See also Erica Levin, ‘Dissent and the Aesthetics of Control: On Carolee Schneemann’s Snows’, World Picture 8 (Summer 2013): 1–​16; and Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 154–​214. 15 Michael Kenward, ‘Sensuous Synergetic Technology Feedback’, New Scientist (23 April 1970), Box 65, Folder 5, Carolee Schneemann Papers, Getty Research Institute. 16 Carolee Schneemann, ‘Alice uber Alles …’, London, July 1967, in More than Meat Joy, 122–7 (122); and ‘Thames Crawling’, in More than Meat Joy, 201. 17 Schneemann describes her group performances as physically arduous and psychologically demanding: ‘each particular work took a great deal of training for us to reach a fluid physical inter-​relation, one that isn’t inherently part of our culture’. Carolee Schneemann, ‘On “Performance” ’, in More than Meat Joy, 184. On societal dropout and psychic fallout in relation to art work at the end of the 1960s, see Jo Applin, ‘Hard Work: Lee Lozano’s Dropouts’, October 156 (Spring 2016): 75–​99. 18 Carolee Schneemann, ‘Background’, November 1965, Box 22, Folder 6, Carolee Schneemann Papers, Getty Research Institute. 19 Ibid. 20 Jurgen Ruesch and Gregory Bateson, Communication:  The Social Matrix of Psychiatry (New York: W. W. Norton, 1951), 90. 21 Paul Berg, ‘Push and Pull –​a Furniture Comedy’, St Louis Post Dispatch (19 May 1963), Box 8, Folder 2, Allan Kaprow Papers. 22 Jeff Kelley notes that Kaprow’s set-​up fostered highly normatively gendered conduct, with a group of ‘older women’ working to put things in order. Schneemann’s version exploded this feminised domesticity. Jeff Kelley, Childsplay:  The Art of Allan Kaprow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 85. 23 Carolee Schneemann, interview by Philip Drummond, London, 1972, in More than Meat Joy, 92. 24 Ibid. 25 Labyrinth’s importance for Schneemann is indicated by her reference to it in the opening of More than Meat Joy. Carolee Schneemann, ‘Preface’, in More than Meat Joy, 7. 26 Ibid. 27 Carolee Schneemann, ‘Labyrinth’, n.d., Box 1, Folder 1, Carolee Schneemann Papers, Getty Research Institute. 28 Carolee Schneemann, ‘A New Way of Making an Integration out of Destruction’, n.d., Box 22, Folder 5, Carolee Schneemann Papers, Getty Research Institute. 29 Wiener elucidated how: ‘If I pick up my cigar, I do not will to move any specific muscles. Indeed in many cases, I do not know what those muscles are. What I do is to turn into action a certain feedback mechanism; namely, a reflex in which the amount by which I have yet failed to pick up the cigar is turned into a new and increased order to the lagging muscles, whichever they may be.’ Norbert Wiener,

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The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, rev. edn (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1954 [1950]), 26. 30 Gregory Bateson, ‘The Logical Categories of Learning and Communication’ (1964; expanded 1971), in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2000), 279–​308 (279). 31 Fred Turner describes how, ‘in keeping with Wiener’s cybernetics, they [Bateson and Ruesch] viewed social life as a system of communication and the individual as both a key element within that system and a system in his or her own right’. Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 53. 32 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965 [1948]), 6. 33 Ibid., 144–​54. 34 Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 65. 35 Wiener, Cybernetics, 18. Wiener was fascinated by psychology and psychotherapy because of their concern with supposed breakdowns of neural synapses; despite aspiring to untrammelled communication, cybernetics anticipated elisions within human, mechanical and digital interchange alike. 36 Ibid., 24. 37 For an earlier attempt to apply cybernetic thought to ‘spoken, written or other communications between individuals in an organization, group, nation, or society’, see Karl W. Deutsch, ‘Toward a Cybernetic Model of Man and Society’ (1948–​49), in Modern Systems Research for the Behavioral Scientist: A Sourcebook, ed. Walter Buckley (Chicago: Aldine, 1968), 387–​400 (390). 38 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 110. 39 Schneemann, ‘A New Way of Making an Integration out of Destruction.’ Mahon argues that the domestic forms an important ‘site of resistance’ –​erotic and psychic –​in Schneemann’s work. Mahon, ‘The Domestic as Erotic Rite in the Art of Carolee Schneemann’, 52. 40 Schneemann, ‘Labyrinth’, n.d. 41 Steve Joshua Heims, The Cybernetics Group (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 1991), 149–​50. 42 Schneemann continued to study Freud, recalling of the early 1960s that ‘at the same time, my lover, the composer James Tenney, and I  were reading Freud and Wilhelm Reich’. Carolee Schneemann, interview by Alexandra Juhasz, in Women of Vision:  Histories in Feminist Film and Video, ed. Alexandra Juhasz (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 61–​75 (67). Mignon Nixon observes, however, that Schneemann’s preference for Reich contrasted the critical prioritising of Freud in second-​wave feminism, exemplified by Juliet Mitchell’s 1974 book Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud, Reich, Laing, and Women. Mignon Nixon, ‘Schneemann’s Personal Politics’, in Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting, ed. Sabine Breitwieser (Salzburg: Museum der Moderne, 2015), 44–​53 (49).

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43 Schneemann, ‘Alice uber Alles …’, 127. In a 1969 Playboy article, Morton Hunt linked the trend away from psychoanalysis to both the resurgence of behaviourism after the Second World War, and the popularity of group therapy. Hunt defended psychoanalysis against these incursions, however, pointing to its pervasive influence on US intellectual life. Morton Hunt, ‘The Crisis in Psychoanalysis’, Playboy 16, no. 10 (October 1969): 106–​8, 116, 174–​80 (174). 44 These developments are tracked in Heims, The Cybernetics Group, and Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 131–​59. 45 Schneemann’s implicit connection between pattern and growth in Labyrinth also reflects her interest in the writings of the biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson. In his capacious 1917 study On Growth and Form, Thompson stressed that ‘pattern is correlated with growth, and even determined by it’. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form, Vol. II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963 [1917]), 1090. Thompson appears in Schneemann’s notes as an important figure in her ‘library’. Carolee Schneemann, ‘Notes of Motion (Kinetic Theater)’, August 1968, Box 21, Folder 4, Carolee Schneemann Papers, Getty Research Institute. Sections from these notes are published as the previously cited ‘From “Notes of Motion 1966–​68” ’. On Schneemann and biology, see Judith F. Rodenbeck, ‘Schneemann’s Crystal:  Water Light/​Water Needle’, in Breitwieser, Carolee Schneemann:  Kinetic Painting, 158–​64. 46 Wilhelm Reich, ‘The Workshop of Orgonomic Functionalism’, trans. Therese Pol, in Selected Writings: An Introduction to Orgonomy, 2nd edn (London: Vision Press, 1973 [1960]), 3–​11 (7, 10). 47 Archias compellingly conveys the importance of Reichian ‘involuntary movement’ in Meat Joy. Archias, The Concrete Body, 81. 48 Meredith Morse recounts the influence that kinaesthetics had on the Judson dancer Simone Forti in Soft Is Fast: Simone Forti in the 1960s and After (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 15–​35. 49 Carolee Schneemann, ‘Newspaper Event’, in More than Meat Joy, 32–5 (32). 50 This parallels another mass media immersion, made two years later in 1965 by Marta Minujín in Buenos Aires, entitled Leyendo las noticias en el Río de la Plata (Reading the News in the River Plata). For this Happening, Minujín wrapped her body in newspapers before entering the river and letting them float away and disintegrate. Although bodily boundaries may have been blurred in Newspaper Event, the performance did not stage the total dematerialsisation of the subject in a sea of information, but instead presented the individual as able to mould and assimilate the communications media piled up around them. Both works mark a significant development from the sociologist C. Wright Mills’s fear during the previous decade that ‘contents of the mass media seep into our images of self ’, indicating the extent to which by this point the media was understood to be an undeniable component in the creation of subjectivity. C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), 334. 51 Schneemann, ‘Newspaper Event’, 35. 52 Ibid., 33.

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53 Carolee Schneemann, ‘Labyrinth’, University of Illinois, 1960, Box 1, Folder 1, Carolee Schneemann Papers, Getty Research Institute. 54 Ibid. On the importance of Schneemann’s painterly practice, see Kristine Stiles, ‘The Painter as an Instrument of Real Time’, in Schneemann, Imaging Her Erotics,  2–​16. 55 Schneemann, ‘A New Way of Making an Integration out of Destruction’. 56 Roger Barnard, ‘Dialectics of Liberation:  More Mystified than Ever’, Peace News 1621 (21 July 1967): 12. 57 ‘International Congress Dialectics of Liberation’, in Counter-​Culture, ed. Joseph Berke (London: Peter Owen, 1969), 411. 58 On the history of DIAS, see Kristine Stiles, ‘Sticks and Stones: The Destruction in Art Symposium’, Arts Magazine 63, no. 5 (January 1989): 54–​60. Metzger wrote to Minujín inviting her to take part in DIAS, but she was unable to attend. Gustav Metzger, letter to Marta Minujín, 20 July 1966, Correspondencia I, Archivo Especial Marta Minujín, Fundación Espigas, Buenos Aires. Metzger specifically refers to the documentation of La destrucción by Shunk-​Kender, which was reproduced to accompany an article on the challenge posed to figuration by Pop art and Happenings in the magazine Aujourd’hui. Jean-​Jacques Lévêque, ‘Une crise du sujet dans l’art actuel’, Aujourd’hui: Art et architecture 45 (April 1964) : 18–​23 (21). 59 Berke first encountered Schneemann’s work when he attended the New York performance of Meat Joy in 1964 at the Judson Memorial Church, after which they struck up a correspondence. Berke describes his involvement in DIAS to Schneemann in Joseph Berke, letter to Carolee Schneemann, 13 September 1966, in Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle, ed. Kristine Stiles (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 109–​10. For a flavour of Berke’s speech, see Gustav Metzger and Raphael Montañez Ortiz, ‘Excerpts From Selected Papers Presented at the 1966 Destruction in Art Symposium’, Studio International 172, no. 884 (December 1966): 282–​3. See also the special issue of the magazine Art and Artists dedicated to Auto-​Destructive art in advance of DIAS edited by Mario Amaya: Art and Artists 1, no. 5 (August 1966). 60 Carolee Schneemann, notebook, 1967, Box 18, Folder 2, Carolee Schneemann Papers, Getty Research Institute. 61 Schneemann remembers Metzger as being ‘among the friends’ at the Roundhouse. Carolee Schneemann, letter to Kristine Stiles, 20 January 1980, in Stiles, Correspondence Course, 316–18 (317). Ginsberg had participated in the International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall in June 1965, a key event in the London counterculture, where over 7,000 people gathered, including members of the Kingsley Hall community. 62 Carolee Schneemann, letter to Jan van der Marck, 12 June 1967, in Stiles, Correspondence Course, 119. The Roundhouse is a gigantic Victorian covered railway turntable, which had been salvaged by the playwright Arnold Wesker and transformed into an ad hoc art space, incorporating his Centre 42. 63 Carolee Schneemann, ‘Round House’, in More than Meat Joy, 150–7 (153). 64 James Harding, ‘Between Dialectics, Decorum, and Collage:  Sabotaging Schneemann at the Dialectics of Liberation Congress, London 1967’, in Cutting

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Performances:  Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-​Garde (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 121–​49 (124). 65 Sylvie Simonds provides a valuable analysis of Schneemann’s relationship with the New Left, the Students for Democratic Society (SDS) and antipsychiatry. Simonds goes beyond Harding to argue that the Congress organisers were unable to recognise Round House as a legitimate political intervention, not just because of their retrogressive attitudes to gender, but because Schneemann’s understanding of violence as something that could be exorcised was so different from theirs. Sylvie Simonds, ‘A Countercultural Movement: Examining Carolee Schneemann’s Kinetic Theatre between 1963 and 1970’ (Ph.D.  thesis, McGill University, 2014), 161–​99, http://​digitool.library.mcgill.ca/​thesisfile121261.pdf (accessed 17 January 2020). 66 Carolee Schneemann, letter to Joseph Berke, 15 June 1967, in Stiles, Correspondence Course, 120. A  fragment of a typewritten letter pasted into the flyleaf of Schneemann’s 1967 London notebook reads:  ‘wonderful to use Kingsley Hall to rehearse and make performance in Roundhouse!’ Schneemann, notebook, 1967. 67 Joseph Berke, in Mary Barnes and Joseph Berke, Mary Barnes: Two Accounts of a Journey through Madness (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1971), 92. 68 Kingsley Hall’s experimental status was underscored by its connections with the art world. In 1966, Metzger was invited to show his liquid crystal projections there; this involved placing liquid crystals onto the bed of a projector, and then heating and cooling them through the energy oscillations of a conductive filament, casting their magnified shifts of form and colour over the surrounding walls. Anna Artaker, ‘Chronology’, in Gustav Metzger: History History, ed. Sabine Breitwieser (Ostfildern-​ Ruit: Hatje Cantz and Generali Foundation, 2005), 83–​223 (130). In her account of her time at Kingsley Hall, Mary Barnes also describes a kinetic sculpture by John Latham that residents could climb inside. Barnes, in Barnes and Berke, Mary Barnes, 96, 100. Artistic production was a key part of Barnes’s recovery. After smearing her walls with excrement, she started to paint, and received an exhibition at the Camden Arts Centre in 1969. Barnes, in Barnes and Berke, Mary Barnes, 307–​15. 69 R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (London: Penguin, 2010 [1960]), 31. 70 Echoing Laing, Leary was convinced that ‘two hundred years ago our treatment of the village idiot and nutty old Aunt Agatha was gently utopian compared to the intolerant savagery of the best mental hospital’. Timothy Leary, The Politics of Ecstasy (London: Paladin, 1970 [1968]), 33. Laing visited Leary at his Millbrook estate in the early 1960s and performed ‘a Sufi ballet’ in the kitchen, as related in Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream (London: Heinemann, 1988), 208. These ideas also informed the work of Erving Goffman; see Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968 [1961]). 7 1 Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain:  Sketches of Another Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 183. 72 Schneemann later recalled Laing’s presence at the Congress as dominating and sinister. Carolee Schneemann, interview by Peter Davis, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle (Vancouver: Villon Films, 2011), DVD.

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73 Carolee Schneemann, ‘Image as Process’, Creative Camera 76 (October 1970): 304–​ 9 (307). Schneemann has insisted that the group work in Round House was not erotic, although some audience members mistook their rehearsal process for an orgy. Schneemann, interview by Davis, 2011. 74 Schneemann, ‘Round House’, 157. 75 Michael Kustow, Tank: An Autobiographical Fiction (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975), 46. Kustow invited Schneemann to perform her Naked Action Lecture at the ICA in 1968. 76 Barnes, in Barnes and Berke, Mary Barnes, 85. Laing described the damage wreaked on the individual psyche by miscommunication –​particularly kinaesthetic –​in the social unit: ‘we must know about relations and communications … Disturbed and disturbing patterns of communication reflect the disarray of personal worlds of experience’ involving ‘repression, denial, splitting, introjection, projection, etc.’ R. D. Laing, ‘The Politics of Experience’ and ‘The Bird of Paradise’ (London: Pelican, 1984 [1967]), 46. Jules Henry reached similar conclusions with his study of five families in Pathways to Madness (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972). 77 R. D. Laing, ‘The Obvious’ (1967), in The Dialectics of Liberation, ed. David Cooper (London: Verso, 2015 [1968]), 13–​33 (20). Schneemann’s longstanding enthusiasm for Reich also placed her at odds with some speakers at the Congress, notably Herbert Marcuse. His book Eros and Civilization drew on Freud to argue that ‘the very progress of civilization increases the scope of sublimation and of controlled aggression; on both accounts, Eros is weakened and destructiveness is released’. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1966 [1955]), 107. 78 Gregory Bateson, ‘Conscious Purpose versus Nature’ (1967), in Cooper, The Dialectics of Liberation, 34–​39 (38). 79 Ibid., 39. 80 Schneemann’s concern with forms of collectivity that extended beyond the nuclear family also contrasted the focus in antipsychiatry and cybernetics on the family unit as the locus for macrocosmic social disorders. This often had a strong dose of misogyny, with mothers singled out for the perceived harm they could cause in caring for a child. For example, Ray. L. Birdwhistell connected psychosis with the actions of mothers, drawing on Bateson’s concept of the ‘double bind’ (taken up by Laing and others in antipsychiatry) to argue that contradictory signals received in childhood result in subsequent social alienation. Ray L. Birdwhistell, ‘The Age of a Baby’ (1959), in Kinesics and Context: Essays on Body-​Motion Communication (London:  Allen Lane 1971), 11–​23. On the obsession with the family set-​up and the concept of the double bind in cybernetic sociology, see Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, ‘The Family as Machine: Film, Infrastructure, and Cybernetic Kinship in Suburban America’, Grey Room 66 (Winter 2017): 70–​101. 81 Laing, ‘The Obvious’, 14. 82 Ibid., 15. Laing’s lecture ended with a discussion of one of the most infamous behavioural experiments begun by Stanley Milgram at Yale University in 1961. Milgram

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tested his participants’ obedience to authority by requiring that they administer another subject with a series of electric shocks at ever-​higher voltage, even when they thought they were causing harm. Laing was sceptical about the experiment, arguing darkly that in daily life, rather than experiencing a conflict between obeying authority and doing something they felt to be wrong, ‘there is, for many, perhaps no conflict at all’. Laing, ‘The Obvious’, 32. Milgram published his initial conclusions in ‘Behavioral Study of Obedience’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67, no. 4 (1963): 371–​8. 83 Carolee Schneemann, ‘International Congress of Dialectics of Liberation Presents:  “Round House” Kinetic Theater by Carolee Schneemann’, 29 July 1967, Box 21, Folder 2, Carolee Schneemann Papers (M1892), Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University. 84 Ibid. Schneemann expressed these ideas elsewhere in her notes on the Happening:  ‘IMAGE dividend/​ increment [is] what I’m after:  that dislocation it dissociates … and expands recognition into unknown relations.’ Carolee Schneemann, ‘Round House Notes’, 1967, Box 22, Folder 6, Carolee Schneemann Papers, Getty Research Institute. 85 Schneemann, ‘International Congress of Dialectics of Liberation Presents.’ 86 Carolee Schneemann, untitled notes relating to Round House, n.d., Box 22, Folder 5, Carolee Schneemann Papers, Getty Research Institute. 87 Ibid. 88 Her wish list of materials in the run-​up to the conference included piles of soft plastic, aluminium foil, cloth, cardboard boxes and scrap paper from printing cylinders. Schneemann, fragment of typewritten letter in notebook, 1967. 89 Content is integral to Schneemann’s work; she never came as close as Minujín did to Marshall McLuhan’s argument in The Medium Is the Massage that ‘societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication’. Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage (London: Penguin, 2008 [1967]), 8. 90 Laing diagnosed that people in the grip of psychosis ‘do not seem to have a sense of that basic unity which can abide through the most intense conflicts with oneself, but seem rather to have come to experience themselves as primarily split into a mind and a body’. Laing, The Divided Self, 65. 91 Robert C.  Morgan, ‘Carolee Schneemann’s Viet-​Flakes (1965)’, in After the Deluge:  Essays on Art in the Nineties (New  York:  Red Bass, 1993), 36–​ 40. Schneemann had planned to screen Fuses, but was advised by Berke and Laing that doing so risked courting a charge of obscenity under UK pornography laws. Schneemann noted the hypocrisy that a film of lovemaking was considered ‘obscene’ while the carnage in Vietnam was not. Schneemann, ‘International Congress of Dialectics of Liberation Presents’. According to Harding, the artist screened the work regardless. Harding, ‘Between Dialectics, Decorum, and Collage’, 146. 92 In collaboration with E.A.T., Schneemann created a feedback system for Snows by placing contact microphones under several of her audience members’ seats.

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These picked up noises and movements as they shifted in response to the images onstage, sending this information back to a colour organ designed by the engineer Larry Warshaw, as well as overhead lights and speakers. Carolee Schneemann and Ralph Flynn, ‘Aspects of E.A.T.  in the Making of Snows’, and ‘ “Snows”  –​ Technical Description’, in E.A.T. News 1, no. 2 (June 1967): 15–​18, Box 2, Folder 1, Carolee Schneemann Papers, Getty Research Institute. This newsletter edition also contained an account of Minujín’s Minuphone by Per Biorn. 93 Russell Hunter, quoted in Jonathon Green, Days in the Life: Voices from the English Underground, 1961–​1971 (London: Heinemann, 1989), 210. 94 Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New  York:  Studio Vista, 1970), 66. Schneemann’s films were shown in the context of Expanded Cinema, and have also been historicised in relation to wider avant-​garde combinations of experimental film with performance and installation. On Snows and its relation to Viet-​ Flakes within the field of Expanded Cinema, see Carolee Schneemann, ‘On the Development of Snows and Other Early Expanded Cinema Works’, interview by Duncan White, New  York, April 2008, in Expanded Cinema:  Art, Performance, Film, ed. Steven Ball, David Curtis, A. L. Rees, and Duncan White (London: Tate, 2011),  85–​90. 95 Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 77. 96 This links Round House to other anti-​ Vietnam performances in London. These included the Argentine artist Leopoldo Maler’s 1968 staging of León Ferrari’s found-​ text denunciation of the war, Palabras ajenas (The Words of Others) (1967), at the Arts Lab in Drury Lane, as Listen, Here, Now:  A News Concert for Four Voices and a Soft Drum. Maler moved between Buenos Aires and London in the 1960s, and acted as one of the assistants on Minujín’s Simultaneidad en simultaneidad. By 1967 he was back in London, working for the BBC, and Schneemann seems to have acquired his contact details from Minujín; her 1967 London notebook contains a note referencing ‘Leopoldo Maler at the BBC in London’ alongside a note referring to Minujín. Schneemann, notebook, 1967. On Palabras ajenas and Maler’s performance, see Ruth Estévez, Agustín Díez Fischer and Miguel A. López, eds, The Words of Others: León Ferrari and Rhetoric in Times of War (Los Angeles:  REDCAT/​CalArts’ Downtown Center for Contemporary Arts, 2017). 97 A documentary of the congress by Peter Davis shows that Schneemann was an active participant in some debates. It captures her contributions alongside Gustav Metzger to a spirited discussion about art and violence, which references Vietnam, the atomic bomb, civil rights, and uprisings across the USA by African American communities. Peter Davis, dir., Anatomy of Violence (Vancouver:  Villon Films, 1967), DVD. 98 Schneemann, interview by Davis. This is confirmed by Schneemann’s notes, in which she envisaged Round House as ‘a sensory expression of many of the conditions explored verbally by the congress’. Schneemann, ‘Round House Notes.’ 99 Schneemann, interview by Davis.

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100 Carolee Schneemann, ‘Congress Quotations’, n.d., Box 22, Folder 5, Carolee Schneemann Papers, Getty Research Institute. 101 In his Congress address, Marcuse condemned ‘a society growing on the condition of accelerating waste, planned obsolescence and destruction, while the substratum of the population continues to live in poverty and misery’. Herbert Marcuse, ‘Liberation from the Affluent Society’ (1967), in Cooper, The Dialectics of Liberation, 175–​92 (180). While Schneemann’s mise-​en-​scène resonated with Marcuse’s condemnation of consumer society, it also found creative possibility and potentiality in that waste. 102 Barnard, ‘Dialectics of Liberation’, 12. 103 Schneemann, ‘Congress Quotations’. 104 One attendee described how ‘we heard lectures by some of the most revolutionary thinkers in the western world, we sang mantras with Allen Ginsberg, we rebelled, we organized, we talked, we learned how to get high on oxygen, how to get stoned on human communication. Several people brought sleeping bags and actually lived there.’ A. M. Fearon, in Freedom, 25 August 1967, quoted in Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1968), 61. By contrast, one woman related how: ‘the day before yesterday I felt out of my mind, I just didn’t know what was happening, I  wasn’t relating to anything. Intellectually one’s been very broken down and made aware of the pedantic stances of intellectuals and the kind of superficiality of it.’ Conference delegate in Davis, Anatomy of Violence, 1967. 105 Carolee Schneemann, untitled notes on Round House, n.d., Box 1, Folder 17, Carolee Schneemann Papers, Getty Research Institute. This is a different wording from the version of these notes published as ‘Round House’, in Schneemann, More than Meat Joy, 151–​7. Elsewhere, she avowed her commitment ‘to continuously reform my troupes. To racially mix performers’. Schneemann, untitled statement in Naylor and P-​Orridge, Contemporary Artists, 857. 106 Carmichael became involved in civil rights activism via the SNCC while a student at Howard University in Washington, DC. He participated in the Freedom Rides and helped organise voter registration in southern states, including Mississippi and Lowndes County, Alabama. It was in Lowndes in 1966 that Carmichael helped organise the establishment of an all-​black political party to run in the county elections, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO), which used a black panther as its icon. This had widespread resonance with parallel groups that emerged across the USA and internationally, including Huey Newton and Bobby Seale’s Black Panther Party (BPP) in Oakland during October that year. Stokely Carmichael, with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) (New  York:  Scribner, 2003), 475. While in London, Carmichael spent time meeting activists and students; on the importance of his visit for forging a sense of transnational communality among artists and writers of colour in Britain, see Ashley Dawson, ‘Black Power in a Transnational Frame: Radical Populism and the Caribbean Artists Movement’, in Mongrel Nation:  Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 49–​72.

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107 Carmichael with Thelwell, Ready for Revolution, 572. This was, he continued, ‘at a time when the only real struggle was not in Europe but in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In no way did the program adequately reflect this’ (573). 108 Ibid., 573. 109 Stokely Carmichael, ‘Black Power’ (1967), in Cooper, The Dialectics of Liberation, 150–​74  (150). 110 Carmichael with Thelwell, Ready for Revolution, 573. 111 Carolee Schneemann, untitled notes on Round House, 18 July [1967], Box 1, Folder 17, Carolee Schneemann Papers, Getty Research Institute. On the emergence of the London-​based chapter of the Black Panthers, see Anne-​Marie Angelo, ‘The Black Panthers in London, 1967–​1972: A Diasporic Struggle Navigates the Black Atlantic’, Radical History Review 103 (Winter 2009): 17–​35. A copy of the BPP’s Ten Point Platform, which called for an end to police brutality against black people, together with full employment, housing and education, can be found in Box 65, Folder 4, Carolee Schneemann Papers, Getty Research Institute. 112 Carmichael with Thelwell, Ready for Revolution, 573. At the conference dinner, Carmichael was subject to racist abuse from Laing, in an episode that starkly punctured the Congress’s liberationist rhetoric, as reported by Alan Marcuson, in Green, Days in the Life, 210. Shortly after the Congress, the Labour Government ordered Carmichael to leave the UK, triggering protests among activists and allies. 113 Carmichael with Thelwell, Ready for Revolution, 573. Carmichael advocated for separatist action, arguing:  ‘In the past, white allies have often furthered white supremacy without the whites involved realizing it, or even wanting to do so. Black people must come together and do things for themselves.’ Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power:  The Politics of Liberation in America (London:  Jonathan Cape, 1968 [1967]), 46. Equally, although women played significant roles in the civil rights movement, the model of nonviolent activism espoused by Carmichael, albeit to a lesser extent than the armed resistance promoted by the BPP, was nonetheless aligned with masculinist models. Sean L. Malloy notes that in the case of the BPP, while ‘figures such as Kathleen Cleaver, Connie Matthews, Elaine Klein, and Denise Oliver were pivotal in facilitating the BPP’s transnational and international connections’, until the party’s split in 1971, ‘BPP women were usually assigned subordinate roles.’ Sean L. Malloy, Out of Oakland:  Black Panther Party Internationalism during the Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017), 14. 114 Schneemann, ‘Notes of Motion (Kinetic Theater)’. 115 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman,  8–​9. 116 See Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain, 171–​211. 117 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 4. 118 Amelia Jones describes how Schneemann has, from early photographic actions such as Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions for Camera (1963) onward, deployed ‘a range of bodily extenders … to explore the relationships among the body, its

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spaces of extension, and other bodies through creative actions pushing the limits of bodily expressivity’. Amelia Jones, Self/​Image:  Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject (London:  Routledge 2006), 172. Schneemann’s work remains alert to the deterministic potentialities of such extenders, concentrating instead on how they might be used to sensitise the social subject. It always retains a sense of individual embodiment, in contradistinction to the feminist posthumanist cybernetics of Donna Haraway’s ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’ (also known as ‘The Cyborg Manifesto’), which asserts:  ‘No objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language.’ Donna Haraway, ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs:  Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’ (1985), in The Haraway Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004), 7–​45 (22). 119 Lifton and Schneemann collaboratated on other so-​called ‘Meat System’ works, including the Electronic Activation Room in Cologne. 120 Schneemann recalled the end of the 1960s as one of psychosocial fragmentation but also countercultural possibility. Her personally and professionally nurturing relationship with Tenney ended and she embarked on an intense but ultimately doomed love affair: ‘I go through a breakdown and leave [the USA]. Everything cracks apart about 1968 or 1969. With that dispersal comes a sense of energy, of being absolutely sure one could make a better culture –​a deeper sense of communality, a deeper sense of sensitivity to the issues of community.’ Schneemann, interview by Juhasz, 68. The artist has described this period in London as one characterised by extreme cultural and social volatility. Carolee Schneemann, ‘Foreword: Live Art Performance Art Body Art’, in Critical Live Art: Contemporary Histories of Performance in the UK, ed. Dominic Johnson (London:  Routledge, 2013), 1–​4 (2). 121 The Chicago Eight were a group of countercultural activists, including Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, charged with conspiracy by the US Government in 1968 after they protested outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. 122 Carolee Schneemann, quoted in Jonathan Cott, ‘Play Power in London’, Rolling Stone (19 March 1970): 15. 123 Schneemann, quoted in ibid. 124 Debra Michals, ‘From “Consciousness Expansion” to “Consciousness Raising”: Feminism and the Countercultural Politics of the Self ’, in Imagine Nation:  The American Counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s, ed. Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle (New York: Routledge 2002), 41–​68 (45). 125 Ibid., 50. Michals excavates a longer history of consciousness raising that goes back to the encounter group therapy developed after the Second World War by the psychologist Carl Rogers, in order to help servicemen address the traumas they had experienced during conflict (51). 126 On consciousness raising and collaboration in 1970s art, see Amy Tobin, ‘I’ll Show You Mine, if You Show Me Yours:  Collaboration, Consciousness-​Raising

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and Feminist-​Influenced Art in the 1970s’, Tate Papers 25 (2016), www.tate.org.uk/​ research/​publications/​tate-​papers/​25/​i-​show-​you-​mine-​if-​you-​show-​me-​yours (accessed 18 January 2020). 127 Allan Kaprow, in ‘Session I’, transcript of a discussion with Suzanne Lacy, n.d., 4, Box 53, Folder 18, Allan Kaprow Papers. 128 The artists Felipe Ehrenberg and Martha Hellion, who had fled Mexico on account of political repression, ran the Beau Geste Press from Langford Court South in Cullompton, Devon using a Gestetner printing machine. See Zanna Gilbert, ‘“Something unnameable in common”: Translocal Collaboration at the Beau Geste Press’, ARTMargins 1, nos 2–​3 (June–​October 2012): 45–​72; and Simon Anderson, ‘Fluxus, Fluxion, Fluxshoe: The 1970s’, in The Fluxus Reader, ed. Ken Friedman (London: Academy Editions, 1998), 22–​30. Schneemann was included in the 1972 Fluxshoe exhibition that toured to various venues across the UK. 129 Carolee Schneemann, ‘Sexual Parameters Survey’, n.d., Box 3, Folder 2, Carolee Schneemann Papers, Getty Research Institute. This was strongly informed by Schneemann’s experience as an American in Britain, which afforded her a degree of participant-​observer detachment, and fostered a heightened sense of awareness about what was happening around her. This is a recurrent theme across the artist’s notes and correspondence from this period:  ‘I find London sweet and rich … tacky, wacky, every banal event personalized, an encounter between people cognizant of me an other [sic] –​potentially expressive as would be rare in New York.’ Carolee Schneemann, letter to Michael [no surname], n.d., Box 21, Folder 3, Carolee Schneemann Papers (Stanford). Alison Green discusses Schneemann’s London works as the product of personal and cultural exile in ‘Intermedia, Exile, and Carolee Schneemann’, in Across the Great Divide: Modernism’s Intermedialities, from Futurism to Fluxus, ed. Christopher Townsend, Alex Trott and Rhys Davies (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2014), 137–​57. 130 Schneemann, ‘Sexual Parameters Survey.’ 131 Ibid. 132 Carolee Schneemann, ‘Camera seeing through …’, in Parts of a Body House Book (Cullompton: Beau Geste Press, 1972), n.p. 133 Schneemann, ‘Sexual Parameters Survey’. 134 Like Minujín’s use of the survey form, this echoes, but also maintains an important distance from, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh’s oft-​cited diagnosis of Conceptual art as manifesting an ‘aesthetic of administration’. Buchloh proposes that this marked a paradigm shift in postwar art production, and brought art into conjunction with the ‘operating logic of late capitalism’. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Conceptual Art 1962–​1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions’, October 55 (Winter 1990): 105–​43 (143). 135 For an extended analysis of the continued presence of affect in Conceptual art that ostensibly embraced structuralist systems, see Eve Meltzer, Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), particularly 153–​204 on Mary Kelly.

Carolee Schneemann’s group work

136 Carolee Schneemann, ‘Parts of a Body House Book, 1972’, in Breitwieser, Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting, 214. Sections from Schneemann’s ‘Notes of Motion’ and reflections on Expanded Cinema, together with sections of scores and reproductions of letters to friends, appear in the book. 137 Portrait Partials might be said to contest the disciplinary effects of photography, as outlined during the late 1970s and the 1980s by practitioners and theorists such as Martha Rosler and Allan Sekula, notably the latter’s diagnosis of the camera’s integration into a ‘larger ensemble:  a bureaucratic-​ clerical-​ statistical system of “intelligence” ’. Allan Sekula, ‘The Body and the Archive’, October 39 (Winter 1986): 3–​64 (16). The connection between lens-​based media and the surveillance of the embodied subject –​particularly the female subject –​and their convergence in sociological data-​gathering are the focus of Rosler’s video work Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained (1977). 138 Nixon contends that Schneemann’s work ‘departs from second-​wave feminism’s political privileging of motherhood and maternal subjectivity. Liberation, in her art, is preeminently erotic liberation.’ This has led, Nixon argues, to Schneemann providing ‘a foil for psychoanalytic feminism, rather than a complement to its mothercentered politics’. Nixon, ‘Schneemann’s Personal Politics’, 45, 50. 139 The notion of the survey as a feminist tool was also propounded by the British artist Rose Finn-​Kelcey, who fantasised about a ‘statistical questionnaire’ for women harassed by men that would ‘provide the aggressor with a detailed profile of his repugnant personality type, compiled by the woman, actually on the spot, by marking off his apparent characteristics on a blank prepared questionnaire and leaving him with it’. Lisa Tickner, ‘One for Sorrow, Two for Mirth: The Performance Work of Rose Finn-​Kelcey’, Oxford Art Journal 3, no. 1 (April 1980): 58–​7 1 (62). 140 Rosalind Delmar, ‘Women and Work: A Document on the Division of Labour in Industry’ (1975), in Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970–​85, ed. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock (London: Pandora, 1987), 201–​2 (201). 141 See Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution (London: Piatkus, 1990). 142 Social reproduction is labour that is not remunerated through the wage –​notably domestic work and childcare –​but which is nonetheless vital to the replenishment of the labour force under capital. Its gendered division remained latent in Marxist analysis until feminist theorists including Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James addressed this in detail during the 1970s. A  helpful overview of key debates surrounding the Wages for Housework campaign can be found in Ellen Malos, ed., The Politics of Housework (London: Allison & Busby, 1982), particularly the introduction by Malos on 7–​43. For an analysis of Mary Kelly’s involvement with feminist filmmaking from a social reproduction perspective, see Siona Wilson, ‘From Women’s Work to the Umbilical Lens: Mary Kelly’s Early Films’, Art History 31, no. 1 (February 2008): 79–​102. 143 Significantly, Schneemann’s privileging of eroticism as freedom led to her work being side-​lined within feminist art, and the repeated charge of ‘flamboyant exhibitionism’. Kristine Stiles, introduction to Correspondence Course, xlvi. In

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her 1976 essay on women’s body art, Lucy R.  Lippard notes that Schneemann became ‘known in the early 1960s as a “body beautiful” because she appeared nude in Happenings –​her own as well as those of Oldenburg and others’, an association that proved hard to shake. Lucy R. Lippard, ‘The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth: European and American Women’s Body Art’, in From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1976), 121–​38 (126). Amelia Jones examines the politics of narcissism in relation to Hannah Wilke’s art with relevance for Schneemann’s practice, in Amelia Jones, Body Art/​ Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 151–​95. 144 The two artists were in close correspondence during the 1970s. In one letter Hiller refers to a possible collaboration, presumably proposed by Schneemann, apologising for being unable to accept the offer owing to lack of time and energy. Susan Hiller, letter to Carolee Schneemann, 8 June [no year], Box 44, Folder 5, Carolee Schneemann Papers, Getty Research Institute. 145 Susan Hiller, ‘Duration and Boundaries’ (1975), in Thinking about Art: Conversations with Susan Hiller, ed. Barbara Einzig (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 170–​81 (172, 173).

Lea Lublin’s exercises in denaturalisation

Schneemann’s decision to let the curtain fall on her Kinetic Theatre in 1970 marks one end of the Happening. This chapter begins with another point of dispersal. For Jean-​Jacques Lebel, one of the most visible European practitioners to experiment with the Happening, the protests, strikes and occupations by students and workers that disrupted France during May 1968 proved the ultimate fruition of the energies pursued in his performances.1 As such, the May 1968 phenomenon rendered the Happening obsolete.2 Yet the impact of the Happening’s imbrication with the particularities of communication, acknowledged in Lebel’s own declaration that each performance enlivened a ‘network of meanings linked to a precise psychological and social context’, continued to mark artistic developments that extended the form’s insights in new ways.3 One such work was an action created by Lea Lublin at the 1968 Salon de Mai, as Lebel joined the protesting crowds on the Paris streets. Lublin’s intervention entailed displaying herself with her baby son in front of the picture she had submitted to the exhibition. The artist did not conceptualise this as a Happening, and her use of the body differs substantially from the collective, collaborative performances Beyond the Happening has addressed so far. However, this gesture and the work that followed expanded on the Happening’s investigation of communication, continuing its interaction with contemporaneous debates spanning sociology, psychology and psychoanalysis.4 Lublin’s career constitutes a series of exercises in denaturalisation, played out across embodied actions, installations and video. These drew on sociology to question received patterns of behaviour and interaction but, as the 1970s progressed, also registered the impact of the Mouvement de libération des femmes (MLF). Like Schneemann, Lublin maintained a critical approach to the social sciences, one mediated by feminism. Lublin’s parents migrated to Argentina from Poland shortly after her birth. After a period living in Paris in the 1950s, during the 1960s and 1970s Lublin moved back and forth between Europe and Latin America, executing projects

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in Paris, Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile.5 Between 1964 and 1968, Lublin’s main base –​like that of many other Argentine artists –​was Paris, although she travelled to Argentina and Cuba, where she participated in exhibitions and maintained contacts.6 In Paris, Lublin cultivated a network of interlocutors and venues for her work, exhibiting with the Salon de la Jeune Peinture and the Salon de Mai.7 An initial expressionist, neo-​figurative phase resulted in a 1964 solo exhibition at Galerie Lahumière. These paintings of violently distorted heads, with gaping mouths and distended teeth, were partly inspired by Lublin’s visceral reaction against the US Republican politician Barry Goldwater, who ran for president that year. They were quickly placed within the context of postwar humanism, as demonstrated by the catalogue essay’s references to ‘the mute panic of man in the face of the world’s most violent occurrences’.8 The press response continued this alignment with ‘new figuration’, reading Lublin’s canvases as a ‘cruel and fantastic bestiary’ that addressed the global catastrophe threatened by the Cold War.9 Lublin’s paintings then assumed a Pop aesthetic, featuring images of key figures from Latin American history such as José de San Martín, who led the fight for independence in Argentina, Chile and Peru during the nineteenth century, together with contemporary icons such as Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara and Fidel Castro.10 These were combined with windscreen wipers affixed directly to the canvases, and united under the collective heading Voir clair (Ver Claro; To See Clear), with the professed aim of recuperating ‘the true image of heroes and leaders’.11 Lublin also started painting on layers of Plexiglas, attempting to instigate a sense of visual disturbance and movement. These experiments in turn catalysed her embodied action at the Salon de Mai, paving the way for the installations, participatory projects and videos that followed.12 Although the artist had already established a vested interest in denaturalising the image, May 1968 reoriented her practice toward a critique of social formulation, and the examination of psychosensorial communication. These aspects of Lublin’s work were reflected in her involvement with the international programme of activities and exhibitions developed by the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (Centre for Art and Communication; CAYC) in Buenos Aires, particularly between late 1968 and 1972, when Lublin lived in Argentina. After her return once again to Paris in the 1970s, she maintained ties with the organisation. The CAYC deployed systems theory and cybernetics in an attempt to establish a framework for artistic production that spanned multiple countries. Lublin’s work found a foothold in this context, while her investigation of communication and socialisation also aligned her with the Collectif d’art sociologique (Sociological Art Collective) in France, launched in October 1974 by the artists Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest and Jean-​Paul Thénot.13 However, Lublin’s interest in interpersonal relations, together with her attendant desire to interrogate ingrained assumptions and behaviours, ultimately remained

Lea Lublin’s exercises in denaturalisation

distinct from these activities, owing to her engagements with psychoanalysis and feminism. Lublin’s exercises in denaturalisation demonstrate how art in the 1970s continued to elaborate the kinds of alternative models of sociological and psychological study in which the Happening had become ever more invested, while moving into feminist, conceptual and socially engaged practice. Contesting socialisation during May 1968 The idea of the Salon de Mai was proposed in 1943, toward the end of the occupation of France, by figures working in the Resistance. It was formally announced in December 1944, four months after the Liberation of Paris. The aim of the founders, led by the president, Gaston Diehl, was to provide a more open alternative to existing salons, and the Salon de Mai became notable for its heterogeneous plethora of styles and materials. By the mid-​to-​late 1960s, while this still ensured a welcoming, diverse space, it was sometimes perceived as a negative, vitiating factor.14 The Salon’s diversity, however, meant that it offered a site where artistic innovation could occur. The 1968 Salon de Mai at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris (MAMVP) contained two very different examples of experimentation. The first was a gigantic, collaboratively produced mural, painted the preceding year when the Salon de Mai committee and several of its regularly exhibiting artists travelled to Cuba in July 1967, at the invitation of Wifredo Lam.15 Artists including Bernard Rancillac, Gérald Gassiot-​Talabot and Lourdes Castro met and mingled with poets, writers and critics from across Europe and Latin America, such as Roland Penrose, Michel Leiris and Alain Jouffroy. The mural’s design, devised by Eduardo Arroyo, consisted of a snail-​shell spiral emanating from its centre, divided into segments for each artist to fill.16 Jouffroy’s description of its creation during one intense night in Havana casts the experience as a giant participatory Happening that united poetic and political revolt. A crowd gathered to watch under the awning of the Cuba Pavilion on La Rampa in Havana, so-​called because of its steep descent toward the Malecón sea wall, as artists clambered up an illuminated scaffold and painted their allotted section to the accompaniment of music and dancing.17 For Paula Barreiro López, the Havana Mural (also known as the Mural Cuba colectiva) occasioned both an expression of transnational collectivity, and the destabilisation of western artistic conventions, because of its stylistic polyvalence.18 A gesture of solidarity with the Cuban revolution, its display in Paris the following year indicated the connections for many artists and intellectuals between the ferment of 1968 and global liberatory struggle, while providing a vivid manifestation of social and political collaboration.19 By contrast, the other particularly notable experimental work at the Salon de Mai was executed by an individual, and mentioned only briefly in press

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reports.20 Lea Lublin’s Mon fils (My Son) is listed in the catalogue with the paintings, and comprised a work on two layers of Plexiglas depicting Lublin’s seven-​month old son Nicolas, which interwove the outline of his head with a stylised rabbit motif.21 In the event, the artist chose to display herself and Nicolas together with the painting, placing a cot directly before the panels and installing the baby inside. Lublin conducted all of the activities involved in caring for a child (Figure 4.1): ‘I exhibited myself, posed in the everyday gestures of care with which I attended to him: I fed him, I changed him, I talked to him, I played with him.’22 This transformation of Mon fils into a site for embodiment manifests a different set of politics from the Havana Mural, but the works are connected by their challenges to traditional conceptions of artistic agency, and their implicit claims that art can contribute to revolutionary process.23 Lublin’s decision resonated with the wider events of May 1968, which resulted from frustrations among students and workers that had been mounting for several years. Protests erupted at the Nanterre campus of the University of Paris, reaching the Sorbonne by 3 May. On 13 May, united against the brutality with which the government and police repressed the initial demonstrations, hundreds of thousands of people marched on the streets of Paris. A general

4.1 Lea Lublin, Mon fils, May 1968, Salon de Mai, Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, vintage gelatin silver print, 7 1/​16 in × 9 7/​16 in (18 cm × 24 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Lea Lublin’s exercises in denaturalisation

strike across France by an estimated 7–​10 million workers followed, with calls for reduced hours and increased wages, together with greater representation on managerial boards. Students, demanding the right to political activism on campus, better learning conditions and new syllabi, occupied buildings including the Sorbonne, the Ecole nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs and the Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-​Arts. Rod Kedward describes how artists inhabited theatres and cultural centres, as well as the streets, rejecting both ‘the “official” or “bourgeois” culture of Malraux’s Maisons’ and the idea of ‘the work of art as rarefied object’.24 Artists and students joined collaborative workshops, including the Atelier Populaire at the Ecole des Beaux-​Arts, collaborating on anonymous, collectively produced posters supporting the strikes and occupations.25 These soon encompassed museums and galleries, closing the Musée national d’art moderne (MNAM) and entailing that the Salon de Mai shut earlier than planned.26 The strikes, protests and sit-​ins of May 1968 made a significant impression on Lublin.27 The artist’s decision to stage the labour of childcare in a site of high culture corresponds with the act of occupation and the series of ‘displacements’ that Kristin Ross identifies as a key characteristic of the May events, during which students and workers left their allotted spaces in the social order, transgressing accepted routes and routines.28 The language Lublin used to discuss her action is revealing in this respect. As well as calling it a ‘movement’ or ‘displacement’, she repeatedly referred to the transposition of a moment from her ‘everyday life’ (‘vie quotidienne’) into the rarefied space of the museum.29 This connects Mon fils to what Ross describes as the widespread ‘sociological fascination’ with everyday life in postwar French culture, exemplified by the writings of Henri Lefebvre, notably his three-​volume Critique of Everyday Life.30 In the first volume, published in the aftermath of the Second World War in 1947, Lefebvre proposed everyday life as a significant subject of sociological study, in contradistinction to the embrace of metaphysics and mythology that he associated with the Surrealists’ conceptualisation of the everyday. Lefebvre outlined a mode of critique that, drawing on Marx, could comprehend the alienation and dehumanisation that informed everyday life under capitalism, while revealing the everyday as the locus of revelatory transformation: ‘all we need do is simply to open our eyes, to leave the dark world of metaphysics and the false depths of the “inner life” behind, and we will discover the immense human wealth that the humblest facts of everyday life contain’.31 This is the paradox that animates Lefebvre’s Critique, whereby the everyday is simultaneously the means of enervation and liberation. A second edition of the first volume appeared in 1958 with a new foreword that sought to account for the impact of mass consumption and technology during the economic boom of the so-​called trente glorieuses between

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1945 and 1975. This shift in Lefebvre’s understanding of the everyday fostered connections with the Situationists, particularly Guy Debord, and directly informed the Critique’s second volume (1961).32 Here, Lefebvre identifies ‘days of revolution’ as those which ‘allow everyday life to pursue history and perhaps briefly to catch up with it’.33 ‘Such days’, he declares, ‘occur when people will not and cannot go on living as they did before: the everyday as it has been established is no longer enough, and it affords them no satisfaction. And so they shatter the boundaries of everyday life, bringing life as it is lived into the domain of history.’34 This shattering anticipates the May 1968 events and their attack on the spectacularised, commoditised society condemned by Debord in The Society of the Spectacle (1967), and offers a way of reading Mon fils.35 The precise kind of everyday experience that Lublin displaced was only briefly addressed in Lefebvre’s Critique, however. The first volume ends with a proposed programme of sociological investigation that includes the study of women, but the second veers away from this aim. In it, Lefebvre does acknowledge that, despite differences across social classes, ‘ “women” in general bear all the weight of everyday life; they are subjected to it much more than “men” ’.36 Turning to the popular women’s press, Lefebvre argued that this was one of the main mechanisms for the commodification of the everyday, and for the generation of the myths that obscured its revolutionary potential.37 Yet Lefebvre’s analysis of the everyday does not address the gendered nature of its structural inequalities in detail, and as Rebecca DeRoo notes, he presents women as ‘immersed’ in the everyday, rather than able to act upon it.38 Although he allows that, on entering waged labour, women ‘discovered that work in factories or offices was scarcely less monotonous than housework, which in fact was being facilitated by new technology, and that they were in danger of being landed with both’, it was Marxist feminist theory of the 1970s that reconceptualised unwaged domestic work and reproduction as a hidden but vital part of capitalist production.39 Lublin’s focus on the everyday mirrors Lefebvre’s belief in its revolutionary capacity, while offering an alternative sociology of care work and the everyday. Gender emerged as a contested issue during May 1968. The Nanterre protests included demands for the right of male students to enter the women’s halls of residence.40 As this emphasis on male access to women’s bodies indicates, women found it hard to be taken seriously as active political subjects rather than sexualised objects, while gender and sexuality were rarely treated as subjects of analysis in their own right.41 Khursheed Wadia notes that while women participated in strikes and work stoppages in ‘massive and unprecedented’ numbers, their political roles were often limited.42 The mass media, when it did show women’s involvement, reduced them to symbolic representations.43 In a 1973 interview, the writer Marguerite Duras described how the political debates during and after May 1968 were dominated by

Lea Lublin’s exercises in denaturalisation

‘prating men’ who ‘forced women … to keep silent’.44 This exclusion extended to the cultural field. The artist Annette Messager recollects being turned away by the Atelier Populaire at the Beaux-​Arts, as well as its rather ‘macho’ air.45 Mon fils might be said to manifest the frustration with women’s marginalisation during May 1968, which fuelled the formation of the MLF and its widespread emergence in 1970.46 For while Lublin occupied the museum, she was demonstrably not on strike, but engaged in the domestic labour and care tasks required to bring up a child, activities that have historically been strongly feminised and allotted to women through the gendered division of labour.47 Lublin’s display of embodied presence during the Salon de Mai shared the May movement’s resistance to social norms and the regulation of society and culture, but it also executed a critique of the movement, exposing its problematic gender bias through the act of denaturalisation.48 Stephanie Weber compares Lublin’s action with the maintenance art activities that the American artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles developed from her ‘Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition “Care” ’.49 Ukeles famously outlined an (unrealised) project during which she would live in a museum while caring for her child and undertaking maintenance activities.50 When Ukeles performed a set of cleaning and care actions at the Wadsworth Atheneum in 1973 based on this manifesto, in conjunction with the tour of Lucy R. Lippard’s c. 7,500 exhibition, she revealed the constructed nature of the separation between public and private spheres, demonstrating how hidden acts of domestic labour underpinned the smooth running of the institution (Figure  4.2).51 Lublin’s and Ukeles’s gestures parallel Marxist feminist theorisations of women’s unwaged domestic labour, exemplified by the French feminist sociologist Christine Delphy’s assertion in 1970 that, rather than being separate from the workplace, the family was itself ‘the site of economic exploitation: that of women’.52 Like Ukeles’s maintenance activities, Lublin’s exhibition of herself caring for her child brought a supposedly private activity into a public space, exposing their interdependency. The photographs documenting Mon fils might at first glance seem to idealise motherhood, as Lublin clasps her son in a series of beatific poses. Yet the images are highly performative, placing pressure on the construction of the idealised maternal subject. Lublin’s positioning of her body and her son next to a representational image of the child signals her project’s denaturalising aims. Through this juxtaposition, Lublin deliberately sought to create confrontations between systems of representation and reality, image and subject, verbal and visual language, as well as the work and the reactions of the public.53 Mon fils acted as a sociological lure, through which audience members were invited to contrast the image with its source, and question the tableau of reproductive socialisation presented.

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4.2 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Washing/​Tracks/​Maintenance: Inside, 1973, part of Maintenance Art performance series, 1973–​74, performance at Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut.

One photograph captures a middle-​aged woman in a neat hat, with eminently bourgeois pearl earrings glinting in her ears, looking over the crib as Lublin plays with her son (Figure 4.3). The woman momentarily occupies the role of grandmother, representing a chain of socially reproductive duty passed from mother to daughter, but Lublin also endowed her audience with the capacity to question and thereby break this relation. Another photograph of Lublin’s mise-​en-​scène depicts the empty crib standing sentinel in front of the painting, ready for its occupant. The crib bars assume a portentous, even forbidding air, exuding the coercive social conditioning that awaits the child (Figure  4.4). They instantiate Louis Althusser’s contention that, ‘before its birth, the child is … always-​already a subject, appointed as a subject in and by the specific familial ideological configuration in which it is “expected” once it has been conceived’.54 In ‘Women: The Longest Revolution’ (1966), Juliet Mitchell constructed a similar argument but, in contrast to Althusser, emphasised the gendered politics of socialisation: ‘woman’s biological destiny as mother becomes a cultural vocation in her role as socializer of children. In bringing up children, woman achieves her main social definition.’55 Mitchell traced how, with the shift to the nuclear family and the heightened emphasis on the child’s individuality, the ‘socializing and nurturance process increase commensurately in significance.

Lea Lublin’s exercises in denaturalisation

Lea Lublin, Mon fils, May 1968, Salon de Mai, Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, vintage gelatin silver print, 7 1/​16 in × 9 7/​16 in (18 cm × 24 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Bourgeois society is obsessed by the physical, moral and sexual problems of childhood and adolescence.’56 Mon fils staged the socialising action of the mother, but also prompted audiences to resist its naturalisation. Continuing the transformations that had occurred in the Happenings by the mid-​to-​late 1960s, Mon fils acted as a communications device, intended to prompt discussion and exchange among visitors. This interest in critical, self-​reflexive denaturalisation would endure in the works that Lublin developed between 1969 and 1972 in Buenos Aires.

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4.4 Lea Lublin, Mon fils, May 1968, Salon de Mai, Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, vintage gelatin silver print, 7 1/​16 in × 9 7/​16 in (18 cm × 24 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Lea Lublin’s exercises in denaturalisation

The sensorial and the systemic While Lublin’s action during May 1968 intersected with social and cultural concerns specific to France, the May events were a global phenomenon and the displacement she staged also resonated with her own transnational movement.57 The years 1968–69 were particularly violent ones in Argentine politics, and the art scene to which Lublin returned had been rocked by the dramatic politicisation of its avant-​garde. During what Ana Longoni and Mariano Mestman have mapped as the ‘itinerary of 1968’, confrontations occurred between radicalised artists and established cultural institutions such as the Di Tella.58 As well as protests against censorship during the Experiencias 68 exhibition at the Institute during May, in July 1968 artists interrupted Jorge Romero Brest when he attempted to give a lecture at the Asociación Amigos del Arte in Rosario, vividly manifesting the break between politicised practitioners and ‘the modernizing circuit’ that he and the Di Tella embodied.59 General Onganía, the leader of the 1966 coup, was himself overthrown in 1970, and the first part of the 1970s witnessed a succession of military leaders and escalating conflict. Like Minujín, Lublin was not directly affiliated with the more radical artists in Argentina, who increasingly pursued activism.60 Yet Lublin’s time in the country fostered her continued exploration of an analytic mode of communication focused on the denaturalisation of social structures, with a view to their transformation. Although by 1969 the Di Tella’s influence was reduced, that year Lublin embarked on two projects with its support.61 An installation at the Centro de Artes Visuales (CAV) in Buenos Aires, entitled Terranautas, enabled Lublin to scale-​up the investigation of interpersonal communication trialled at the Salon de Mai. Terranautas consisted of a maze environment, filled with natural elements including water, earth and sand. On entering, visitors were plunged into darkness. Equipped with mining headlamps, they had to navigate their way through the labyrinth, analysing their responses to stimuli as they did so. The title of Lublin’s exhibit was a play on, and inversion of, the exploits of cosmonauts and astronauts, with the darkness emulating both outer space and a subterranean cave. The work rejected the Cold War brinkmanship of the space race between the USA and the USSR, reorienting viewers’ attention to ‘the essential elements of life on our planet’.62 The politics of Terranautas ultimately lay, however, in the promotion of a denaturalising attitude among those who entered, underscored by small, illuminated plastic boxes printed with textual imperatives such as ‘think’ (‘piense’) and ‘reflect and act’ (‘reflexione y actué’) (Figure 4.5). This aim was perhaps most apparent in a device whereby Lublin projected images onto hanging plastic strips that the viewer had to pass through like a curtain, thereby physically deconstructing them.63

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4.5 Lea Lublin, Terranautas, 1969, environment at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires, fourteen gelatin silver prints, five maps, five typewritten texts on paper, six offset prints and twenty-​five 35 mm colour slides. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Lea Lublin’s exercises in denaturalisation

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These dynamics continued to inform the second installation, Fluvio subtunal, commissioned as part of a public festival celebrating the completion of a tunnel under the Río Paraná between Santa Fe and Entre Ríos. Lublin inhabited a store scheduled for demolition in Santa Fe and constructed nine ‘zones’ inside.64 Audiences had first to pass through ‘The Source’ (‘La Fuente’), a shallow basin of water necessitating the removal of shoes, comparable to Hélio Oiticica’s Whitechapel Experiment in London of the same year, in which participants were encouraged to take off their footwear and walk on sand.65 Lublin also created an analogue for the real subfluvial tunnel in the form of a long, inflatable tube of transparent plastic, big enough for adults to walk through, filled with a stream of water and spherical inflatables (Figure 4.6).66 The installation constantly prompted participants to consider the act of looking and the subjectivity of their perspective. This was partly an effect of the shop’s glass partitions, which enabled people in different sections to observe each other. It was particularly marked in the Technological Zone, where viewers encountered a bank of fifteen television monitors, broadcasting live footage of other participants forging their way through the environment. In the

Lea Lublin, Fluvio subtunal, 1969, Santa Fe, environment supported by the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires and ALPI (Asociación de Lucha contra la Parálisis Infantil). Private collection.

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exhibit’s last section, they were invited to reflect on their experience, recording their impressions on cards that were then read out loud and ‘broadcast over loudspeakers’.67 This feedback loop replicated an effect in Terranautas, for which Lublin placed a booth at the end of the maze ‘for reflection, in order to invite the spectator to isolate himself and thus become aware of the situation, of the experience lived through’.68 Fluvio subtunal also featured projected images, including photographs of labourers during the tunnel’s construction.69 Lublin’s work cannot be considered an explicit act of institutional critique, particularly given that she continued to rely on the support of the Di Tella at a time when many of her contemporaries had rejected it. Nonetheless, she encouraged participants to question the celebratory rhetoric surrounding the tunnel’s construction. For Jorge Glusberg, Lublin’s permeable inflatable constituted a bathetic ‘species of anti-​ tunnel’ that, like her earlier works of iconic figures, ‘ridiculed institutionalised heroism’.70 Pierre Restany comparably emphasised Fluvio subtunal’s analytical qualities, arguing that it was, first and foremost, ‘a sociological demonstration, a systematic work about the structures of psychosensorial communication’.71 In 1970, Lublin exhibited at the Galería Carmen Waugh in Buenos Aires. In the catalogue, Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas argued that Terranautas and Fluvio subtunal ‘propose the destruction of concepts indissolubly linked to the system: the subject-​author, the unity of the work, and representation’.72 Contemporary commentators received these works as structural critiques, and Lublin’s emphasis on free interpersonal communication contrasted the increasingly repressive sociocultural situation in Argentina.73 However, the compromised relations between Terranautas, Fluvio subtunal and wider institutional structures were endemic to the country’s cultural ecosystem, as encapsulated by the Centro de Art and Comunicación (CAYC), with which Lublin became involved while in Buenos Aires.74 The CAYC formed in 1968 and moved into physical premises on Viamonte Street in October 1970, filling the gap in the Buenos Aires arts scene created by the CAV’s closure that year.75 The CAYC continued the Di Tella’s internationalising impulses, but using a very different conceptual framework that drew loosely on cybernetics and systems theory.76 It became particularly invested in conceptual practice, owing to the ease with which works from different countries could be exhibited through sets of instructions, drawings and photographs. The CAYC’s early programme included exhibitions by the American artist and curator Willoughby Sharp and the British artist Ian Breakwell, and interdisciplinary exchanges between figures such as Umberto Eco and the Argentine sociologist Eliseo Verón, as well as presentations by the French engineer and philosopher Abraham Moles, and David Cooper, following his involvement in the Dialectics of Liberation Congress, on ‘liberatory psychiatry’ in the ‘third world’.77 This reflected the organisation’s heterogeneous engagements across

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the arts and social sciences, and its significant intellectual debt to the rise of sociology and communications theory in Argentina, charted in Chapter 2. The CAYC has a contested legacy, due largely to its divisive director, Jorge Glusberg. Glusberg financed the centre with the profits from his successful lighting business, Modulor. As Néstor García Canclini observes, this entailed that CAYC was essentially a ‘unipersonal institution’, dominated by Glusberg’s vision.78 Luis Camnizter argues that this vision remained in thrall to a form of internationalism that attempted to shoehorn Latin American art production into categories ordained by US and European cultural imperialism. As a result of Glusberg’s ‘self-​promotion and assimilation’, what might have been ‘a serious program of balanced and eclectic exhibitions was reduced to opportunistic switches designed to gather mainstream wind in his sails’.79 García Canclini and Camnitzer moreover accuse Glusberg of troubling proximity to the military dictatorship of 1976–​83.80 In its early years, however, CAYC aligned conceptualism with political intervention, to the extent that Glusberg was threatened with imprisonment by General Lanusse’s government in 1972 when the exhibition Arte e ideología: CAYC al aire libre, part of Arte de sistemas II (Art and Ideology; CAYC in the Open Air, part of Systems Art II) got out of his control, with artists presenting multiple works in the Roberto Arlt Plaza critiquing repression.81 Such initiatives trod a fine line between compliance and contestation, while attempting to negotiate the unequal power dynamics of artistic internationalism. These complexities became particularly apparent in the series of interlinked exhibitions that Glusberg developed in the early 1970s, which embraced a systems approach and the dematerialised practices championed by Lucy R. Lippard in North America.82 Lublin participated in several of these, including From Figuration to Systems Art in Argentina (1971), which premiered at the Museo Emilio Caraffa in Córdoba, before travelling in an expanded version to the Camden Arts Centre in London. Lublin’s work also featured alongside Kaprow’s in Arte de sistemas (Systems Art) of 1971 at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires. This underwent several subsequent iterations, including Art Systems in Latin America (1974), which toured to the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London, as well as the Internationaal Cultureel Centrum in Antwerp and the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels. Yet while there was an affinity between Lublin’s attempt to examine social behaviours and CAYC’s systems-​based approach to communication, the CAYC catalogues also hint at tensions between her practice and their exhibition model. Lublin’s catalogue entry for From Figuration to Systems Art in Argentina at the Camden Arts Centre, for example, juxtaposes a photograph of Fluvio subtunal, showing two women standing inside the inflatable, next to a segment of text that asserts:  ‘art can and must act as art of transformation’, but that to do so ‘it must first question itself in order to decondition, demystify and

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deculturalize. The questioning of the Representation and of the flat image determine their “refusal to become transformed into a system”.’83 Lublin pushed back against the imposition of any given system, rather than taking ‘systems’ as the organising concern of her work. The artist Oscar Bony’s catalogue contribution, meanwhile, stated his outright rejection of the exhibition’s premise, and alerted the reader to his refusal to send any work to London for the show.84 In different ways, Lublin’s and Bony’s interventions signalled the capacity of artists at this stage in the CAYC’s existence to express their scepticism toward its operations. For Arte de sistemas, Lublin presented plans relating to Cultura:  Dentro y fuera del museo (Culture: Inside and Outside the Museum), executed at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago de Chile toward the end of 1971. Her catalogue entry consists of a drawing depicting five stick figures standing on scaffolding and a ladder against a surface identified as the ‘wall of popular free expression’, with ‘long live the revolution’ added underneath (Figure 4.7).85 The word ‘libre’ has, however, been crossed out, suggesting both the censorship of free expression and, more subtly, the ways in which the performance of liberation might be co-​opted to legitimate repressive politics. A comparable tension infuses the CAYC catalogue design more generally. The Arte de sistemas and Art Systems in Latin America publications consisted of loose-​leaf pages for which artists were required to submit information and images. Ostensibly, this created an equalising format that, for example, placed Lublin’s work on a direct continuum with that of an internationally established American artist such as Kaprow.86 However, the gridded lines criss-​crossing each page also entrap the works. If the pages from Arte de sistemas or Art Systems in Latin America were laid out side by side, the individual segments of performance and conceptual documentation would look like fish caught in a vast net. Lublin stressed the importance of denaturalisation in resisting systemic coercion –​of replacing ‘cultural conditioning with the questioning of all the elements that determine the system’ –​but the CAYC’s exhibition projects were arguably unable to reach this level of self-​awareness at an institutional level.87 Cultura:  Dentro y fuera del museo was an ambitious project that went well beyond the CAYC’s bounds, involving an interdisciplinary team whose members included Oscar Masotta and the sociologist Eliseo Verón.88 In an issue of Arte informa dedicated to Arte de sistemas, Lublin laid out her plans, which featured text and diagram panels to be displayed inside the museum, sociologically mapping the connections between creativity and society via a ‘network of connections and ruptures’, diagrammatising the fractures and continuities between visual art and other areas of culture.89 In the final work, Lublin projected images and texts from local television news, documentary films and newspapers onto the museum’s exterior. Panels investigating Chilean

Lea Lublin, Arte de sistemas catalogue entry, 1971, exhibition at the Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires, organised by the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC), Buenos Aires.

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history were combined with information boards that changed every day to reflect what was happening inside the museum, in conjunction with debates and discussions.90 The seeds of this initiative and its desire to make the museum walls permeable can be found in the penetrable image projections that Lublin used in her Di Tella installations. Cultura: Dentro y fuera del museo expanded denaturalisation beyond the individual image to the wider system of cultural production. Rather than seeking to establish the kinds of international links and feedback loops between conceptual artists pursued by the CAYC, Lublin’s relationship with systems prioritised the possibility of denaturalisation, while remaining conscious of the specificities of individual sensorial, embodied experience within a given network.91 As Cultura: Dentro y fuera del museo’s emphasis on discussion indicates, Lublin wanted to keep communication channels open rather than coercing exchange into preformulated routes. This attitude would align her work with explorations of art and sociology in France after her return in 1972.92 Sociological art and video Lublin realised another version of her Inside and Outside the Museum project in 1974 at the Yvon Lambert Gallery in Paris.93 However, her pursuit of denaturalisation increasingly concentrated on a long-​term project with a variety of manifestations, under the umbrella title Interrogations sur l’art: Discours sur l’art (Interrogations into Art:  Discourse on Art). This overlapped with Sociological art in France, and developed in tandem with her turn to video technology. In the mid-​1970s, Lublin worked to create video-​interviews with practitioners who used photography, film and video in their work, including Nil Yalter and Gina Pane, created partly in conjunction with Beaubourg (later renamed the Centre Pompidou after the former President who had conceived the project).94 For Jean-​Paul Cassagnac, Lublin’s works had tangible sociological value in that they produced a detailed account of emergent contemporary practice.95 Yet Lublin’s relationship with sociology went beyond this, as she engaged with and questioned its conceptual tenets and methodologies. Lublin’s use of video as a sociological instrument to catalyse and document debates about artistic practice developed into a series of elaborate recorded discussions with artists, critics and members of the public. Lublin designed a portable studio, which she established at venues including Art/​vidéo confrontation (1974) at the ARC in the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris; the Foire internationale d’art contemporain (FIAC) in 1975, held in the old Bastille station; and the Espace Cardin in 1975, during an iteration of one of the CAYC’s ‘systems art’ shows and its hosting of the Second International Open Encounter on Video.96 Lublin’s set-​up consisted of a couch or a space where

Lea Lublin’s exercises in denaturalisation

Lea Lublin, Interrogations sur l’art: Discours sur l’art, 1975, presented at the Foire internationale d’art contemporain (FIAC), Paris, featuring video equipment and a banner in synthetic polymer paint on fabric, wood, and string, 110 1/4 in × 70 7/​8 in (280 cm × 180 cm). Banner in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

interviewees could sit; her video equipment, featuring a monitor that relayed participants’ images in real time; and a large banner of gridded material onto which questions had been stencilled (Figure 4.8). These included: Is art a desire? Is art jouissance? Is art a sublimation? Is art a neurosis? Is art a sexual problem? Is art a religious phenomenon?97

These served as prompts for discussion, providing a script that triggered improvisatory recitals to the camera. The videos Lublin made of people responding animatedly to her questions amidst the hustle and bustle of art fairs and large-​scale exhibitions, from art-​ world interlocutors such as the critics Pierre Restany and Catherine Millet, to members of the public, are not performances in a traditional sense, but there

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is a strongly performative element to them.98 Many recordings show groups of people gathering around the speakers, forming impromptu audiences. Interviewees frequently reference their consciousness of being watched and filmed. Millet addresses the strangeness of viewing her mediated image fed back to her on the monitor as she ponders Lublin’s list.99 In documentation from Art/​vidéo confrontation, interviewees range from a young man and woman who studiously read through the questions, giving yes and no answers, to a group of overexcited schoolchildren whose teacher mediates for them.100 Lublin can often be heard, off-​camera, engaging in the debates, while spectators frequently contest the parameters of her exercise. One woman, while laughingly agreeing with Lublin that art is a form of jouissance, also protests that the questions are too vague and wide-​ranging.101 In another video, a particularly lively dispute ensues between Lublin and a group of women students, one of whom vociferously resists the premise that video might be considered an artistic medium, while another of her peers adopts the counterargument that definitions by their very nature limit understandings of art.102 These discussions show how the questions encouraged participants to challenge received ideas about artistic production, and to develop new concepts through the performative iteration of their thinking before live audiences and the video camera. The situation that Lublin sought to initiate at the Salon de Mai appears in an enhanced form, as audiences are drawn into extended interpersonal exchanges that have a strongly denaturalising impetus. The critic Dany Bloch felt that Lublin’s recordings of people appraising her questions about art through dialogues and monologues not only fostered a consideration of representational systems but also encouraged each individual to conduct ‘research on themselves’.103 Invoking qualitative surveys, the questions posed in Lublin’s videos are philosophical and psychological as much as sociological, stimulating self-​scrutiny.104 Their construction reflects the emergence of the sociology of art as a subdiscipline in France, one of the first manifestations of which was Jean Duvignaud’s book Sociologie de l’art (The Sociology of Art), published in 1967.105 Duvignaud argued against aesthetic and formalist models for artistic analysis, advocating a Marxist materialist perspective. He asserted that art could only be understood as ‘a part of collective experience … an activity in its own right’, and was ‘not something which can be explained by theories of continuous evolution, primitivism or the sacred’.106 The Interrogations sur l’art works similarly approached the act of creation as the result of collective social activity and influences, tracing the people and power structures involved in the definition of the art object. These aspects of Lublin’s work converge with the ethos of the Collectif d’art sociologique.107 Working together from 1974 to 1980, the artists Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest and Jean-​Paul Thénot organised group exhibitions, established an experimental sociology school in Paris (the Ecole sociologique interrogative),

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and explored formats including the questionnaire and the survey.108 Like the UK artist Stephen Willats, they often collaborated with community groups frequently excluded from art production, particularly people living in working-​ class neighbourhoods.109 Lublin’s sociological use of video to address the construct of art has correlations with Forest’s deployment of the medium in solo works such as Biennial of the Year 2000 (1975) in São Paulo, for which he conducted a study of that year’s Biennial, taping interviews with exhibitors, members of the public and cultural officials. The results were displayed in the exhibition.110 People could view the footage as it accumulated, entailing that, as in Kaprow’s performances, the mechanisms of sociological study were just as much subject to scrutiny as the art system.111 The Collectif d’art sociologique did not advocate the direct implementation of sociology in art. While their activities paralleled the structural approach concurrently developed by Pierre Bourdieu, which would culminate in his treatise on cultural capital Distinction:  A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979), they aimed to query sociology just as much as art.112 As Fischer asserted: ‘our attitude consists not only in moving beyond the category “art” … but also in questioning and putting in doubt academic sociological discourse’, by returning to ‘the concrete reality of actual experiences’.113 Lublin’s list of questions for the Interrogations sur l’art banner similarly pulled away from academic sociology into a more discursive exploration of communication. It treated interaction as a form of consciousness raising whereby participants were encouraged to challenge social conventions, particularly as perpetuated through systems of image-​production. In 1975, documents relating to Lublin’s works were included in the first two exhibitions organised by the Collectif d’art sociologique during their initial year of activity. Ruth Erickson describes these ventures as functioning ‘foremost as spaces of research’ from which trajectories of ‘participation, socially engaged media, and urban intervention’ emerged.114 Lublin also contributed, together with members of the Collective, to the three-​week project Une expérience socio-​écologique:  Photo–​film–​vidéo (A Socio-​ Ecological Experience:  Photo–​ Film–​Video) in the German village of Neuenkirchen, the results of which were subsequently displayed in Paris at the ARC.115 This stemmed from an invitation for artists to spend three weeks in Neuenkirchen, with ‘the aim of creating communication between art and the village’.116 It was organised by the Office franco-​allemand pour la jeunesse (OFAJ), a French–​German youth exchange organisation, with assistance from the town’s Falazik Gallery. Works included a video action by Forest, and an iteration of Fischer’s Pharmacie Fischer, at which he handed out idiosyncratic prescriptions for intelligence, hygiene and originality.117 Lublin developed a version of Interrogations sur l’art:  Discours sur l’art during which she took her banner (translated into German) and video equipment outside the gallery to multiple sites around Neuenkirchen,

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including the edge of a wood and in front of a supermarket (Figure  4.9), shifting the valences of her questions by relocating them, and increasing the reach of her public engagement.118 The year 1975 was a busy one for the artist. It closed with Lublin’s solo exhibition at the Internationaal Cultureel Centrum (ICC) in Antwerp from 22 November to 21 December, where she showed stills and segments from her videos.119 Lublin used this opportunity to conduct further interviews using

4.9 Lea Lublin, Interrogations sur l’art: Discours sur l’art, 1975, presented as part of Une expérience socio-​écologique: Photo–​film–​vidéo, Neuenkirchen, Germany.

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the banner at a market, during which slightly bemused but willing passers-​by embarked on impromptu elaborations of their definitions of art, surrounded by fruit-​and-​vegetable stalls.120 In May 1975, she had participated in The Video Show at the Serpentine Gallery, London, in collaboration with Artists for Democracy (AFD), who presented ‘Is Art an Enigma? An Event for Lea Lublin’.121 The exhibition catalogue foregrounded video’s oppositional potentialities, declaring:  ‘we should use the new kinds of technologies of cheap, portable video-​tape units … and make a new kind of television that does not depend on broadcasting but, instead, draws its energies from communication and art’.122 Lublin’s treatment of video in the works related to Interrogations sur l’art was similarly democratising, while her engagement with sociology had a revisionist intent that can be linked back to her experiences during May 1968. The self-​reflexive encounters between art and sociology devised by Lublin and figures associated with Sociological art paralleled the arguments for alternative sociological methodologies espoused in the aftermath of the May protests.123 In the postscript to his 1969 book The Post-​Industrial Society, ‘Why Sociologists?’, Alain Touraine condemned what he saw as French sociology’s complicity with the ‘programmed society’. He argued that the discipline had been ‘blinded by the vigor of economic growth and the rapidity of social change’ rather than adequately contesting consumption and technocracy.124 Building on Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life, Touraine asserted that ‘what we need most urgently is not an analysis of social behavior but of society, considered no longer as a situation but as a system of action, a network of cultural orientations and power relationships’.125 Touraine ended on a hopeful note, positing that sociology had developed the critical tools required for transformative social analysis, and declaring that it was the only discipline that ‘makes it possible to transcend the contradictions between the impersonal control exercised by technocracy and the revolt in the name of personal and collective creativity’.126 Like the Collectif d’art sociologique, Lublin responded to the shifts in sociological practice after May 1968. Her investigation of social and cultural structures, specifically their elaboration –​and potential deconstruction –​through the communications process, echoes Touraine’s approach to society as a ‘system of action’, rather than disparate, isolated behaviours. Interrogating ‘woman’ Despite the intersections between Lublin’s work and Sociological art, however, there were also key differences. Whereas members of the Collectif d’art sociologique questioned the relevance of psychoanalysis for art, Lublin increasingly engaged with the discourse during the 1970s.127 The staging of the videos relating to Interrogations sur l’art, particularly during exhibitions and art fairs where Lublin could confront the viewer with their screen image, had strong

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echoes of the psychoanalytic consulting room. Lublin referred to the monitor using the overtly Lacanian formulation of the ‘screen-​mirror’.128 Moreover, the artist conceptualised the video interview as a way of releasing gestures and expressions that offered symbolic manifestations of repressed thoughts and wishes.129 Although Lublin’s most sustained engagement with psychoanalytic theory came after Mon fils, her 1968 action informed her later focus on occluded and distorted images within society, notably a series of works that mined depictions of the Virgin and Child as key sites of representational repression.130 Lublin’s practice also differed from that of the Collectif d’art sociologique in that it addressed issues of gender more directly, particularly through its mobilisation of the body.131 Lublin was part of a network of women artists working in France concerned with the tensions between embodied experience and sociological methodologies. Nil Yalter’s contribution to Une expérience socio-​ écologique: Photo–​film–​vidéo, for example, used photography and drawing to study women workers in the town, including the cleaner of the Falazik Gallery, directly confronting the feminisation of domestic labour and the inequalities of waged work.132 On 11 March 1978, Lublin contributed to a day-​long presentation of works entitled Action de 5 femmes (Action by 5 Women) at the Quai de Bourbon studio belonging to the artist Françoise Janicot on the Ile Saint-​Louis in Paris. Over the course of the day and into the evening, the five artists  –​ Janicot, Lublin, Elisa Tan, Claude Torey and Yalter –​presented their works as visitors came and went. A video documenting the event, comprising short sections shot at different periods, reveals a lively, vibrant atmosphere, in which the activities of art making overlapped with animated discourse between participants and attendees.133 It shows Janicot crouching on the floor and busying herself with a selection of magazines to make a collage, before standing in front of a slide projector and taking off and putting back on pieces of clothing, as images cycle through the machine.134 The video returns several times to Tan’s performance, for which she sat at a table steadily tapping away at a typewriter, repeatedly conjugating the verb ‘to work’ (‘travailler’). The clacking of the keys, together with the thud of the carriage as it reaches the end of the return, ricochets off the walls in Janicot’s light and airy studio, becoming cumulatively dominating and oppressive, alluding to the unequal remuneration of women’s work.135 The video captures a prolonged discussion about Torey’s photographs, and ends with a shot of an installation by Yalter that reflected on women’s experience in the artist’s home country of Turkey. Apart from Torey’s photographs, the works were ephemeral and performative, underscoring the impression of a transnational feminist creative community conjured into being for a short but productive space of time. For Dissolution dans l’eau: Pont Marie, 17 heures (Dissolution in Water: Pont Marie, 5pm) Lublin rewrote the questions that covered the Interrogations sur

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l’art banner so that they instead unfolded misogynist views related to the construction of ‘woman’, including: ‘Is woman a whore?’ and ‘Is woman private property?’.136 The banner hung on the wall of the studio throughout the day. Late in the afternoon, Lublin climbed up onto a ladder and took it down, before leading a group of participants outside to the Pont Marie over the Seine, holding the unfurled list aloft (Figure  4.10). On reaching the bridge, they collectively lowered the banner into the water, symbolically dissolving its restrictive models of women’s identity. Lublin’s questioning of sex and gender stereotypes recalls the in-​depth analysis of biological, sociological, historiographical and mythological conceptualisations of woman in Simone de Beauvoir’s foundational 1949 text The Second Sex. Beauvoir pays particular attention to the confinement of women in the role of the ‘other’:  ‘to pose Woman is to pose the absolute Other, without reciprocity, denying against all experience that she is a subject, a fellow human being’.137 Lublin’s banner similarly critiques how the figure of ‘woman’ is cast as multiple others, challenging the societal naturalisation of these tropes.138 While it is important to acknowledge the complex distinctions between feminist art and art by women in the contexts of French and Argentine art alike, Lublin’s action had a strongly feminist intent, transforming the model of the sociological questionnaire into a tool for consciousness raising and collective exchange.139

Lea Lublin, Dissolution dans l’eau: Pont Marie, 17 heures, 1978, Paris, gelatin silver print, 7 1/​16 in × 9 7/​16 in (18 cm × 24 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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In an account of her practice for a 1977 special issue of the feminist publication Sorcières on art and women, Lublin wrote movingly of the impact that motherhood had had on her life and career, describing how this ‘unexpected event’ disrupted her everyday existence with its ‘profound organic transformations, its joys, its fears’.140 Lublin’s decision to display the labour of motherhood during the Salon de Mai constitutes a making visible of women and their experience, to which she would return in Dissolution dans l’eau. By articulating a set of ingrained cultural stereotypes as questions that followed dizzyingly one after the other with destabilising effect, Lublin’s banner exposed their superficiality, and the embedded structural inequalities that lent them potency. Lublin’s Sorcières essay culminates in a critique of how culture enacts a repression ‘of women, of their image’.141 Both Mon fils and Dissolution dans l’eau, although executed ten years apart, demanded that audiences question the images of women constructed by society and consider how embodied experience may diverge dramatically. By referencing a number of identities but refusing to settle on one, Lublin’s banner creates a sense of ‘woman’ as multiple and polyvalent, corresponding with the writings of theorists working in France such as Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray.142 Through a feminist rereading of Freud and Lacan, Irigaray asserted that woman’s sexuality, ‘always at least double, goes even further: it is plural’ (italics in original).143 In this respect, Lublin’s work could be linked to écriture feminine’s approach to women’s bodies, psyches and creative production as defined by their inherent difference.144 Yet Lublin’s writings and practice did not promote an essentialist model of women’s identity, instead seeking to denaturalise processes of socialisation, whether through performing the figure of the mother, or dismantling ingrained gender stereotypes. They might thus be said to be closer to Beauvoir’s analysis of womanhood as a shifting process of constant becoming.145 The Action de 5 femmes was part of the activities undertaken by the Femmes/​ Art collective during the 1970s, which coalesced around the figure of the writer, artist and psychoanalyst Françoise Eliet.146 Femmes/​Art emerged when Eliet became involved in plans to present a women-​only exhibition at the ARC in 1976.147 Although the exhibition did not take place, the experience exposed Eliet to the work of many contemporary women practitioners. A group started to meet on a regular basis, and in 1977 published a collective manifesto entitled ‘Enfermement/​Rupture’ (‘Confinement/​Rupture’).148 While Femmes/​ Art engaged with feminist rereadings of psychoanalysis and explorations of embodiment, it ultimately remained primarily concerned with practical strategies that would enable women to make art and access professional opportunities.149 Fabienne Dumont notes that Femmes/​Art was not wedded to any particular ideology expounded by the various groups that made up the wider MLF, even though the interest of some members in psychoanalysis might have ostensibly

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aligned it with the controversial Psychanalyse et politique (Psychoanalysis and Politics) faction.150 But the collective’s 1977 manifesto dismissed the kind of separatism promoted by Psychanalyse et politique, instead prioritising individuality and forms of identification that rejected essentialism.151 Not only did the group embrace diverse artistic practices –​including painting, film, cinema and design –​but they maintained their dedication to addressing how ‘as women, we are oppressed politically, socially, economically’, rather than focusing on questions of sexual difference.152 While Lublin shared interests with the CAYC and the Collectif d’art sociologique in communication, connectivity and structural critique, her approach, like Schneemann’s, comes closer to feminist consciousness raising –​ in the flexible and supple form promoted by Femmes/​Art, which encompassed materialist and psychoanalytic thinking. Lublin’s work reflects how the transformation of the Happening into a tool for analysing interpersonal exchange during the mid-​to-​late 1960s had significant ramifications for feminist practice. The Happening’s close engagement with sociology and psychology morphed as the 1970s progressed into more conceptual and socially engaged spheres. But the attention to interpersonal communication forged in the intense crucible of the Happenings continued to influence artists working with the body in a multiplicity of ways, becoming a fundamental aspect of much critical art making. Notes 1 On performance art and performativity in France, see Jean de Loisy, ed., Hors limites:  L’Art et la vie, 1952–​1994 (Paris:  Centre Pompidou, 1994); and Kaira M. Cabañas, The Myth of Nouveau Réalisme: Art and the Performative in Postwar France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). Lebel forged connections among artists in Europe, the USA and Latin America. He visited Argentina and Uruguay in 1967, where he screened a montage of films at the Di Tella, and performed his Happening Hommage à Lautréamont in Montevideo. 2 Regarding Lebel’s movement away from Happenings, see the essays in Axel Heil, Robert Fleck and Alyce Mahon, Jean-​Jacques Lebel:  Barricades (Cologne:  Walther König, 2014). After May 1968, Lebel dismissed ‘non-​political Fluxus-​type events, arty-​farty happenings, and street shows such as those organized by the Groupe de Recherche de l’Art Visuel [sic] which claim to be “unintentional” and not aimed at the destruction of the existing social structure’, instead championing politically engaged street theatre. Jean-​Jacques Lebel, ‘Notes on Political Street Theatre, Paris:  1968, 1969’, The Drama Review: TDR 13, no. 4 (Summer 1969): 111–​18 (111). Despite Lebel’s dismissal of the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV), Claire Bishop traces an oppositional narrative for their work in Artificial Hells:  Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), 77–​104.

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3 Jean-​Jacques Lebel, ‘Theory and Practice’, trans. G. Livingstone-​Learmouth, in New Writers, Vol. IV: Plays and Happenings (London: Calder & Boyars, 1967), 13–​45 (23). 4 Lublin’s work has been historicised in relation to institutional critique, as well as the sensorial and performance-​based practices that developed across Argentina and Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s. Lea Lublin is represented by ‘Project:  Inside/​ Outside the Museum’ (1971), in Institutional Critique:  An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 130–​1. Her work featured alongside that of Marta Minujín, Alberto Greco, Lygia Clark, Ana Mendieta and Hélio Oiticica in Sabine Breitwieser, ed., Vivências (Vienna: Generali Foundation and Walther König, 2000). 5 On the transnationalism of Lublin’s practice, see Isabel Plante, ‘Between Paris and the “Third World”:  Lea Lublin’s Long 1960s’, Artl@s Bulletin 3, no. 2 (Fall 2014): 48–​67, article 4, https://​docs.lib.purdue.edu/​artlas/​vol3/​iss2/​4/​ (accessed 17 January 2020). 6 This itinerary included a 1965 show at the Galería La Ruche in Buenos Aires. In one interview, Lublin reflected that her ideal scenario would be to spend half the year in each country, so that she could participate in both art worlds. ‘Lea Lublin: París, Buenos Aires y primavera’, El Mundo, 5 September 1965, 41, Lea Lublin (AP LUBL), Dossiers documentaires d’artistes, Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre Pompidou, Paris. On Argentine artists in Paris during the 1960s, see Isabel Plante, Argentinos de París:  Arte y viajes culturales durante los años sesenta (Buenos Aires:  Edhasa, 2013); and for the longer history of these relations, Michele Greet, Transatlantic Encounters:  Latin American Artists in Paris between the Wars (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2018). 7 Lublin exhibited at the Salon de Mai in 1966 and 1967, including the version that travelled to Cuba (represented by a work entitled Un cyclone à La Havane). She also exhibited at the Salon de la Jeune Peinture, including in 1965. Francis Parent and Raymond Perrot, Le Salon de la Jeune Peinture: Une histoire, 1950–​1983 (Issy les Moulineaux: Editions Patou, 2016 [1983]), 38. 8 ‘de la sourde panique de l’homme exposé aux pires déchaînements du monde’. Christian Feugeas, in Lea Lublin: L’Incitation au massacre (Paris: Galerie Lahumière, 1964), n.p. 9 Jacques Michel, ‘Figuration nouvelle’, Le Monde (6 November 1964). ‘Lea Lublin a depuis longtemps évoqué la menace d’une catastrophe universelle en peignant un bestiaire cruel et fantastique. Cette fois-​ci le bestiaire a prise face humaine et la dénonciation est devenue plus directement politique.’ Michel Tronche, untitled clipping from Les Lettres françaises (November 1964). Both clippings in Lea Lublin (AP LUBL), Dossiers documentaires d’artistes. On the debates concerning humanism and figuration in this period, see Sarah Wilson, The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), particularly 41–​63. 10 That these works were read as a Pop experiment is indicated by the press coverage; one review, illustrated with Lublin’s reworking of the Mona Lisa, was entitled ‘ “La Joconde” Gets Paris Show’s Pop Treatment’, New York Herald Tribune (2 November 1965), Lea Lublin (AP LUBL), Dossiers documentaires d’artistes.

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11 ‘Para recuperar la verdadera imagen del héroe y del prócer’. Lea Lublin, ‘Lea Lublin y la realidad cambiante’, interview by Belkis Cuza Malé, Granma (1966), Lea Lublin (AP LUBL), Dossiers documentaires d’artistes. 12 Lublin described how, previously, she ‘had started a series of transparencies on glass and acrylic, planes which were superimposed but separate  –​the displacement of the spectator gave the impression of movement.’ Lea Lublin, ‘Process to the Image’, interview by Esther Ferrer, Lápiz 6, no. 59 (May 1989): 38–​45 (40). Printed in the Spanish edition as ‘Juicio a la imagen’. The English version can be found in Archivo Especial Lea Lublin, Fundación Espigas, Buenos Aires. 13 Their first manifesto, dated 7 October 1974, was published in Le Monde’s 9 October edition. Reproduced in Hervé Fischer, Théorie de l’art sociologique (Tournai: Casterman, 1977), 24–​5. 14 Pierre Restany concluded of the 1967 iteration that:  ‘The chaos of the presentation adds further still to the anarchic confusion of the ensemble.’ (‘Le chaos de la présentation ajoute encore à la confusion anarchique de l’ensemble.’) Pierre Restany, ‘César en expansion’, Domus 451 (June 1967): 48. 15 Lam developed close ties with the Salon de Mai while in Paris, exhibiting frequently with the organisation. Born in Cuba, Lam lived in Europe for eighteen years, from 1923 to 1941. Although the Second World War forced him to return to the country, he travelled frequently to the USA and Europe in the 1940s, and in 1952 settled in Paris. In 1963, he made an extended visit to Cuba and became involved in attempts to integrate culture with the new revolutionary politics. Lam’s invitation to the Salon de Mai committee resulted both in the Havana Mural and an exhibition of works from the 1967 Salon, which opened in Havana that August. The initiative coincided with government celebrations of the fourteenth anniversary of Castro’s 1953 attack on the Moncada army barracks in Santiago de Cuba  –​a key moment in the revolutionary struggle against Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship –​and the first meeting of the Organización Latinoamericana de Solidaridad (OLAS). On the mural, see Günter Schütz, ‘Paris in Cuba 1967: The Salón de Mayo and the Cuba colectiva Mural’, in Cuba: Art and History from 1868 to Today, ed. Nathalie Bondil (Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2008), 276–​9. On Lam’s international connections and organisation of the July–​ August events, see Lowery Stokes Sims, Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-​ Garde, 1923–​1982 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 149–​64. 16 Alain Jouffroy, ‘La Grande Spirale’, in Ezio Gribaudo, Mural Cuba colectiva 1967: Salon de Mai (Turin: Edizioni d’Arte Fratelli Pozzo, 1970), n.p. One section was left empty for Fidel to fill; he never did so. 17 ‘exécuté en une nuit devant la foule massée sur la Rampa, l’une des artères les plus populaires de La Havane, chacun de ceux qui y ont participé, en montant sur les échafaudages dressés devant la grande toile blanche et dans la lumière des projecteurs, a pu ressentir, pour la première fois de sa vie, la coïncidence de l’invention poétique révolutionnaire avec l’invention politique révolutionnaire’.  Ibid. 18 Paula Barreiro López, ‘Algarabía tropical en la vanguardia:  Wifredo Lam, la izquierda cultural española y la Cuba revolucionaria’, in Wifredo Lam, ed. Catherine David (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2016), 35–​41 (38).

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19 On these connections as they played out in Robho magazine, see Isabel Plante, ‘Les Sud-​américains de Paris:  Latin American Artists and Cultural Resistance in Robho Magazine’, Third Text 24, no. 4 (July 2010):  445–​55. On artistic collaboration in France during this period, see Jill Carrick, ‘The Assassination of Marcel Duchamp: Collectivism and Contestation in 1960s France’, Oxford Art Journal 31, no. 1 (March 2008): 1–​25; Sami Siegelbaum, ‘The Riddle of May ’68: Collectivity and Protest in the Salon de la Jeune Peinture’, Oxford Art Journal 35, no. 1 (March 2012):  53–​73; and with specific reference to the Havana Mural, Jacopo Galimberti, ‘The Moment of Collective Painting, 1963–​1968’, in Individuals against Individualism: Art Collectives in Western Europe (1956–​1969) (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017), 167–​275. 20 Le Figaro reported that Lublin ‘exhibits her own baby in a cot obtained for the Salon’ (‘Lea Lublin expose son propre bébé dans un lit conçu pour le Salon’). Jeanine Warnod, ‘Les Propositions du Salon de Mai: La Peinture gagne sur l’objet’, Le Figaro (6 May 1968). The work was also discussed in ‘ “Mon fils” ou la réalité objective’, La Marseillaise (7 May 1968), and reproduced with a photograph in ‘Art “objectif ”: elle expose son fils’, L’ Ardennais (6 May 1968). All clippings in the Salon de Mai Archives, Collection of Marc Giai-​Miniet, Trappes. 21 24e Salon de Mai (Paris: Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1968), 8. 22 ‘moi m’exposant, posais à travers les gestes quotidiens des soins que je lui apportais: je le nourrissais, le changeais, lui parlais, jouais avec lui’. Lea Lublin, ‘La Créativité ou les organes invisibles’, Sorcières 10 (1977): 46–​50 (47). 23 Although Lublin did not travel to Cuba with the Salon de Mai in 1967 –​perhaps because she would have been several months’ pregnant –​she visited the country in 1966 to act as a juror for an exhibition at the Casa de las Américas, and while there expressed her support for the Cuban revolution. Lea Lublin, ‘Conversación con Lea Lublin’, interview by Graziella Pogolotti, Artes plásticas (May–​August 1966): 201–​2. 24 Rod Kedward, La Vie en bleu:  France and the French since 1900 (London:  Allen Lane, 2005), 422. As Minister of Culture during the 1960s, André Malraux had focused on establishing ‘maisons de la culture’ (‘houses of culture’) in cities across France. 25 On the posters produced by the Ateliers Populaires, see Philippe Artières and Eric de Chassey, Images en lutte: La culture visuelle de l’extrême-​gauche en France (1968–​ 1974) (Paris:  Beaux-​Arts de Paris éditions, 2018); and Liam Considine, ‘Screen Politics:  Pop Art and the Atelier Populaire’, Tate Papers 24 (2015):  www.tate.org. uk/​research/​publications/​tate-​papers/​24/​screen-​politics-​pop-​art-​and-​the-​atelier-​ populaire (accessed 16 January 2020). Victoria H.  F. Scott discusses the wider image politics of the protests within the context of media censorship, in ‘May 1968 and the Question of the Image’, Rutgers Art Review 24 (2008): 87–​104. 26 The Musée national d’art moderne (MNAM) was a particular focus of ire for its retrogressive approach and lack of engagement with living artists. In a call for protests at the museum during May 1968, the critic François Pluchart proclaimed it ‘sclerotic and useless’ (‘sclérosée et inutile’). François Pluchart, in François Pluchart and Pierre Restany, ‘Une autre Bastille à abattre: Le Musée d’art moderne’, Combat

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7415 (18–​19 May 1968): 16. The Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris opened in 1955, partly in an attempt to address this problem, and shared the Palais du Tokyo with the MNAM (now the Centre Pompidou collection). After the widespread closure of cultural institutions during the protests, including that of the MNAM on 18 May 1968, several artists attempted to withdraw their works from the Salon in solidarity, but were unable to retrieve their paintings when officials barred their entry. Jacques Michel, ‘L’Art et la “révolution”: Le happening permanent’, Le Monde (25 May 1968), clipping from Salon de Mai Archives; and François Pluchart, ‘Les Hyènes du Musée d’art moderne’, Combat 7422 (27 May 1968): 10. Rebecca J. DeRoo gives a detailed study of the institutional conflicts around May 1968 in The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art:  The Politics of Artistic Display in France after 1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 19–​70, addressing the MNAM closure on 41. 27 In the 1989 interview with Ferrer, Lublin refers to ‘May 1968, which was so important for all of us’. Lublin, ‘Process to the Image’, 40. 28 Ross links this ‘new kind of mass organizing … that involved physical dislocation’ to the impact of protests against the Algerian War, and later Vietnam. Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 25. Hannah Feldman argues that the presence of Algerians in Paris, notably a street protest on 17 October 1961 against a curfew that was met with severe brutality by the CRS (Compagnies républicaines de sécurité) riot police, during which people were shot, beaten to death and drowned, ‘marked the true arrival of the French nation to the conditions of postcoloniality’ and played a key role in reconceptualisations of urban space. Hannah Feldman, From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945–​1962 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 175. 29 ‘Je déplace un moment de ma vie quotidienne dans l’artistique en m’exposant avec mon fils qui est né en 1967.’ Lea Lublin, ‘Je circule dans un espace qui n’est pas fixe’, interview by Janie Gras and Simone Raskin, Histoires d’elles 10 (March 1979): 13. The English version of the Ferrer interview uses ‘displace’: ‘the previous year, my great joy had been the birth of my son and I said to myself: the best thing for me to do is to displace a moment of my everyday life to an artistic space, the Museum [sic]’. Lublin, ‘Process to the Image’, 40. 30 Kristin Ross, ‘French Quotidian’, in The Art of the Everyday:  The Quotidian in Postwar French Culture, ed. Lynn Gumpert (New York: Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, 1997), 19. 31 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. I: Introduction, 2nd edn (1958 [1947]), trans. John Moore (2011), in Critique of Everyday Life:  The One-​Volume Edition (London: Verso, 2014), 152. 32 Michael Sheringham traces the connections between Lefebvre and the Situationists from 1958 to 1961, including Debord’s contribution to a seminar of the Groupe de recherche sur la vie quotidienne in 1961, which Lefebvre ran at the Centre d’études sociologiques of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique. Michael Sheringham, ‘Henri Lefebvre: Alienation and Appropriation in Everyday Life’, in

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Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 134–​74 (170). 33 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. II: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday (1961), trans. John Moore (2002), in Critique of Everyday Life: The One-​ Volume Edition, 297. 34 Ibid., 297. 35 Lefebvre arrived at the Sociology Department in Nanterre during 1965, where Daniel Cohn-​Bendit, one of the leaders of the revolts, was a student. Johan Heilbron argues that the involvement of radical sociology in May 1968 severely punctured the mood of ‘professional optimism’ that had dominated the discipline during the 1950s and 1960s, engendered by its significant state support after the war (the first degree programme was established in 1958). Johan Heilbron, French Sociology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 158. See also Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-​Smith (New  York:  Zone Books, 1995 [1967]); and Herbert Marcuse, One-​Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (New York: Routledge, 2002 [1964]). 36 Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. II, 305. 37 Ibid., 374–​81. For an analysis of consumption and the construction of femininity in the postwar period that engages closely with Lefebvre, see Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies:  Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 71–​122. 38 DeRoo, The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art, 128. DeRoo makes this point with regard to Annette Messager’s work, which she reads as critiquing the gendered structures of everyday life in a way that corresponds with Lublin. 39 Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. II, 381. Lefebvre’s conception of the domestic realm has essentialist elements. While condemning the privatisation of everyday life, he presents the home as nonetheless linked to the cyclical, rural, precapitalist time celebrated in Volume I: ‘In factory life, the young worker sees himself caught up in fragmented linear time, the time of production and technology. In family life, he will rediscover cyclic, biological, physiological and social time scales’ (344). Such conceptions would be strongly countered by the Wages for Housework campaign. See Louise Toupin, Wages for Housework:  The History of an International Feminist Movement, 1972–​7 7, trans. Käthe Roth (London: Pluto Press, 2018 [2014]). 40 Kedward, La Vie en bleu, 417. 41 Julian Bourg concludes that while ‘it was true that sex was viewed as some kind of challenge to repressive bourgeois society … critical energies were directed toward work and speech and generally not focused on gender and sexuality’. Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics:  May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (Montreal: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2007), 182. 42 Khursheed Wadia, ‘Women and the Events of May 1968’, in Keith A. Reader, with Khursheed Wadia, The May 1968 Events in France: Reproductions and Interpretations (Basingstoke:  Macmillan, 1993), 148–​66 (150). See also Claire Duchen, Women’s Rights and Women’s Lives in France, 1944–​1968 (London: Routledge, 1994), particularly 165–​89 on May 1968.

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43 Wadia, ‘Women and the Events of May 1968’, 149. Analysing May 1968’s representation in the French press, Antigoni Memou contends that the homogenised depictions of crowds failed to communicate the diversity of the protesters. Antigoni Memou, Photography and Social Movements: From the Globalisation of the Movement (1968) to the Movement against Globalisation (2001) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 23. 44 Marguerite Duras, extract from an interview in La Création étouffée (1973), trans. Virginia Hules, in New French Feminisms:  An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981), 111–​13 (111). 45 ‘En Mai 68, je suis allée aux Beaux-​Arts de Paris pour tenter de participer à la création d’affiches. Ils m’ont refusée. Il n’y avait, à ma connaissance, pas de femme dans cet atelier, dit populaire, moi j’y ai senti un entre-​soi assez macho, mais je peux me tromper.’ Annette Messager, in Femmes et filles:  Mai 68, ed. Pascale de Langautier and Inès de Warren (Paris: Editions de L’Herne, 2018), 187. 46 Michèle Idels, Sylvina Boissonnas, Elisabeth Nicoli, Christine Villeneuve and Catherine Guyot, MLF –​Psychanalyse et politique 1968–​2018: 50 ans de libération des femmes, Vol. I:  Les premières années (Paris:  des femmes–​Antoinette Fouque, 2018), 17. 47 While a crèche was established in the occupied Sorbonne, the issues of childcare and women’s restriction to the role of primary caregivers remained unaddressed; they became central to the MLF during the 1970s. For an overview of the groups that made up the MLF and their demands, see Claire Duchen, Feminism in France: From May ’68 to Mitterrand (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986). 48 Lublin may have distinguished her action from Body art, which ‘did not yet exist’, but the presentation of embodied experience is paramount in Mon fils. Lublin, ‘Process to the Image’, 40. François Pluchart’s key essay on Body art appeared in 1974; see François Pluchart, ‘Notes sur l’art corporel’, ArTitudes International, 12–​14 (July–​September 1974): 46–​66. Gina Pane, one of the figures most strongly associated with Body art, dates her work in the field to 1968. Gina Pane, ‘Mon langage’, in Lettre à un(e) inconnu(e), ed. Blandine Chavanne and Anne Marchand, with Julia Hountou (Paris: Beaux-​Arts de Paris éditions, 2012), 58. 49 Stephanie Weber, ‘Lea Lublin –​Retrospeculum’, in Lea Lublin –​Retrospective, ed. Matthias Mühling and Stephanie Weber (Munich: Lenbachhaus and Snoeck, 2015), 38–​57  (39). 50 ‘I will live in the museum as I customarily do at home with my husband and my baby … for the duration of the exhibition.’ Mierle Laderman Ukeles, ‘Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition “Care” ’ (1969), in Mierle Laderman Ukeles:  Maintenance Art, ed. Patricia C.  Phillips (New  York:  Queens Museum of Art, 2016), 210–​11 (211). 51 Helen Molesworth incisively analyses these dynamics in ‘House Work and Art Work’, October 92 (Spring 2000): 71–​97. 52 Christine Delphy, ‘The Main Enemy’ (1970), in Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression, ed. and trans. Diana Leonard (London: Verso, 2016), 57–​77

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(59). Delphy’s analysis coheres with the aims of the Wages for Housework Campaign; see Nicole Cox and Silvia Federici, Counter-​Planning from the Kitchen: Wages for Housework, a Perspective on Capital and the Left (New York: New York Wages for Housework Committee and Falling Wall Press, 1976). For a revisionist perspective on Wages for Housework, see Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2011), 79–​111. 53 As Lublin described it: ‘Le système de la représentation était là, confronté au réel, le rapport de l’image à son modèle, du modèle à la constitution d’un langage visuel mais aussi verbal, comportements et réactions du public face “à l’œuvre”.’ Lublin, ‘La Créativité ou les organes invisibles’, 47. 54 Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)’ (1970), in On Ideology (London: Verso, 2008), 1–​60 (50). 55 Juliet Mitchell, ‘Women: The Longest Revolution’, New Left Review 40 (November–​ December 1966): 11–​37 (26). 56 Ibid., 28. 57 For global analyses of May 1968, see Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert and Detlef Junker, eds., 1968: The World Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and George Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1987). 58 Ana Longoni and Mariano Mestman, Del Di Tella a ‘Tucumán arde’: Vanguardia artística y política en el 68 argentino (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 2013 [2000]), 21. 59 Ibid., 123. 60 Longoni and Mestman list León Ferrari, Margarita Paksa and Roberto Jacoby, among others, as following this trajectory. Ibid., 254. 61 In a letter of October 1968 to Leopoldo Maler, then living in London, León Ferrari recounted how ‘in art, that formalist avant-​garde … clustered around [Jorge] Romero Brest has fallen apart. A  few have stayed at Di Tella, others have gone abroad, and others have split from the institutions and galleries and do political art, or have turned their imagination to politics.’ León Ferrari, letter to Leopoldo Maler, 7 October 1968, trans. Marguerite Feitlowitz, in Listen, Here, Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-​Garde, ed. Inés Katzenstein (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2004), 285–​7 (287). According to Enrique Oteiza, the director of the overarching Di Tella Institute, this was a difficult experience for Romero Brest, who found it ‘extremely painful’ to be ‘set up as a thing of the past’. Enrique Oteiza, ‘Romero Brest:  The Freedom of an Innovator’, interview by María José Herrera and Mariana Marchesi, in Jorge Romero Brest:  La cultura como provocación, ed. Edgardo Giménez, trans. Rafaela Gunner (Buenos Aires: Edgardo Giménez, 2006), 90–​139  (128). 62 Lublin, ‘Process to the Image’, 40. 63 Lublin described how, in Terranautas and Fluvio subtunal, ‘I project the images which the spectator must cross in two directions, and I de-​centre them, displace them, etc., in an effort to emphasize how limited/​unlimited their function is.’ Ibid., 42.

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64 La Fuente (The Source), Zona de los vientos (Wind Zone), Zona tecnológica (Technological Zone), Zona de la producción (Production Zone), Zona sensorial (Sensorial Zone), Zona de descarga (Unloading Zone), Fluvio subtunal (Sub-​ fluvial Tunnel), Zona de la naturaleza (Nature Zone) and Zona de la participación creadora (Zone of Creative Participation). 65 Oiticica reported that ‘the crowd was huge and the unprecedented success unbelievable. Everyone took their shoes and socks off, etc., and participation was much greater than we had imagined.’ Hélio Oiticica, letter to the artist’s family, 28 February 1969, trans. Stephen Berg, in Oiticica in London, ed. Guy Brett and Luciano Figueiredo (London: Tate, 2007), 42. 66 The work received short shrift from Marta Traba when the tunnel section (presented as Penetración/​Expulsión) was shown at the II Coltejer Art Biennial (1970) in Medellín as Argentina’s contribution, together with a piece by Julio Le Parc. Traba dismissed Lublin’s and Le Parc’s installations as ‘two dead works, forced, without charm’. For Traba, Fluvio subtunal’s ‘walkable vaginal inflatable in which no one walked’ was derivative internationalist fodder (‘dos obras muertas, forzadas, sin gracia: un inflable vaginal caminable que nadie caminaba’). Marta Traba, Dos décadas vulnerables en las artes plásticas latinoamericanas, 1950–​1970 (Buenos Aires:  Siglo XXI, 2005 [1973]), 195. A  very different atmosphere is recorded in Jacqueline Barnitz’s review of the Biennial, which describes the tunnel as ‘perpetually filled with curious young people making their way through its womb-​like interior’. Jacqueline Barnitz, ‘Medellín: The Biennale’, Arts Magazine 44, no. 8 (Summer 1970): 54–​5 (55). 67 ‘El espectador podrá, además, volcar sus impresiones sobre el recorrido en unas tarjetas, y una selección de estos comentarios se transmitirán por altoparlantes.’ Bengt Oldenburg, ‘Hernandarias y el ocio’, Análisis (December 1969): 68, Archivo Especial Lea Lublin, Fundación Espigas. 68 Lublin, ‘Process to the Image’, 40. 69 Jorge Glusberg, ‘El Fluvio subtunal’, Dinamis 16 (January 1970): 58, Archivo Especial Lea Lublin. 70 ‘su Fluvio subtunal, una especie de antitúnel … que ridiculiza el heroísmo institucionalizado’. Ibid. 7 1 ‘¿Qué es el “Fluvio subtunal”? Primero, y ante todo, una demonstración sociológica, un trabajo sistemático sobre las estructuras de la comunicación psico-​ sensorial’. Pierre Restany, ‘El Fluvio subtunal de Lea Lublin: Una arquitectura de la información’, El litoral (16 December 1969), Archivo Especial Lea Lublin. This was based on Restany’s direct experience during a visit to Argentina in 1969. 72 ‘propone la destrucción de conceptos indisolublemente ligados al sistema:  el sujeto-​autor, la unidad de la obra y la representación’. Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas, ‘La lectura del sistema’, in Lea Lublin: Proceso a la imagen; Recorrido conceptual. Elementos para una reflexión activa (Buenos Aires:  Galería Carmen Waugh, 1970), n.p. 73 This corresponds with GRAV’s work, in which Le Parc played a central role. Arnauld Pierre describes how ‘ “questioning behaviour” became one of the GRAV’s

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watchwords’, while Lily Woodruff notes that ‘the primary strategy by which GRAV empowered the public was by training what might be called its critical apperception skills’. Arnauld Pierre, ‘Instability: The Visual/​Bodily Perception of Space in Kinetic Environments’, in The ‘Do-​It-​Yourself ’ Artwork: Participation from Fluxus to New Media, ed. Anna Dezeuze (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 91–​112 (97); and Lily Woodruff, ‘The Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel against the Technocrats’, Art Journal 73, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 18–​37 (19). 74 Lublin participated in a 1970 symposium on sculpture at the Galería Bonino. The artist also joined a debate with Luis Benedit, Victor Grippo and Kenneth Kemble about the usefulness of art criticism for practitioners. CAYC press release, ‘Primer simposio de escultura’, 1970, PREST.XSAML14/​8; and CAYC press release, ‘Dos coloquios CAYC a cargo de Fermín Fevre’, GT18, 23 November 1970, PREST TOP AML 006 (2/​4), Fonds Pierre Restany, INHA-​Collection Archives de la critique d’art, Rennes. 75 Jorge Glusberg, What Is the Center of Art and Communication? (Buenos Aires: Centro de Arte y Comunicación, 1987), n.p. Although the CAV’s closure was more a consequence of SIAM Di Tella’s waning financial health than of political attacks, its decease was symptomatic of the atmosphere of crisis. 76 Glusberg worked to situate several of the CAYC artists within the wider art-​world embrace of cybernetics, forming an ‘Art and Cybernetics’ group and organising exhibitions and projects related to this theme in the early 1970s. 77 CAYC press release, ‘Humberto [sic] Eco en el CAYC’, n.d., PREST.XSAML14/​41; CAYC press release, ‘Arte y comunicación: Seminario a cargo de Abraham Moles’, GT-​82, 24 September 1971, PREST.XSAML14/​78; and CAYC press release, ‘Arte y locura por David Cooper’, GT-​202, 25 January 1973, PREST TOP AML 006 (4/​4), Fonds Pierre Restany. 78 Néstor García Canclini, ‘Modernity after Postmodernity’ (1990), trans. Gabriel Pérez-​Barreiro, in Beyond the Fantastic:  Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America, ed. Gerardo Mosquera (London: Iniva, 1995), 20–​51 (43). 79 Luis Camnitzer, Conceptualism in Latin American Art:  Didactics of Liberation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 248. 80 Canclini, ‘Modernity after Postmodernity’, 44–​5; and Camnitzer, Conceptualism in Latin American Art, 304–​5, n. 10. 81 For an account see Eve Kalyva, ‘Art and Violence in the Open Air: The Activities of CAYC’, in Image and Text in Conceptual Art:  Critical Operations in Context (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 80–​103. 82 Glusberg met Lippard on her visit to Argentina in 1968 and the two subsequently worked on an iteration of one of her ‘Numbers Shows’ in 1971; on this fraught experience see Pip Day, ‘Locating “2,972,453”:  Lucy R.  Lippard in Argentina’, in Cornelia H.  Butler, Pip Day, Peter Plagens, Griselda Pollock, Caroline Tisdall, Antony Hudek et  al., From Conceptualism to Feminism:  Lucy Lippard’s Numbers Shows 1969–​74 (London: Afterall, 2012), 78–​97. 83 Lea Lublin, in Jorge Glusberg, From Figuration Art to Systems Art in Argentina, trans. Raul Colbert (London: Camden Arts Centre/​Centro de Arte y Comunicación, 1971), n.p. This statement relates to several important texts that Lublin wrote to

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explain her work in the 1970s under the headings ‘Proceso a la imagen’ (‘Image Process’) I (1967/​68), II (1969) and III (1969). The latter were composed in conjunction with Terranautas and Fluvio subtunal respectively. Reproductions can be found in Lea Lublin –​Retrospective, ed. Mühling and Weber, 323–​5. 84 Bony asserted: ‘I am against the idea of any kind of art exhibit, that is why I am not sending any work to Camden. In addition I am in favour of non-​participation as being true avant-​garde.’ Oscar Bony, in Glusberg, From Figuration Art to Systems Art in Argentina, n.p. 85 ‘muro de la libre expresión popular, viva la revolución’ (presumably a reference to Salvador Allende’s 1970 election victory). 86 Gina McDaniel Tarver carefully weighs the pros and cons of Glusberg’s designs, noting that, for all its constraints, the standardised presentation placed Latin American artists on equal footing with their European and American counterparts, while the inexpensive production enabled practitioners to exhibit internationally who might have otherwise been unable to. Gina McDaniel Tarver, The New Iconoclasts:  From Art of a New Reality to Conceptual Art in Colombia, 1961–​1975 (Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, 2016), 187. 87 Lublin, in Glusberg, From Figuration Art to Systems Art, n.p. 88 Masotta’s remit is listed as ‘social history of madness’ (‘Historia Social de la locura’). Lea Lublin, ‘Dentro y fuera del museo’, Arte informa 7 (July 1971): 6, PREST.XSAML 14/​87, Fonds Pierre Restany. 89 ‘la “Red de conexiones y rupturas” que señalarán y explicitarán las fracturas y continuidades, las relaciones y los obstáculos que el lenguaje plástico refleja correlativamente al de las demás áreas culturales’. Ibid. 90 Ibid. See also Lea Lublin, ‘Project Inside/​Outside the Museum’, in Lea Lublin  –​ Retrospective, ed. Mühling and Weber, 325–​6. 91 Camnitzer condemns the CAYC’s ‘carpet-​mailing’ of the international art world, whereby ‘promotional material was incessantly sent to all individuals’ so that the organisation ‘became a caricature of solicitation’. Camnitzer, Conceptualism in Latin American Art,  248–​9. 92 Analysing Lublin’s experience of censorship in Latin America for her engagement with sexual and erotic themes, Plante cites a letter of 11 September 1972 from Lublin to Restany in which she relates her adoption of a stance on the violence in Argentina, indicating that this may have prompted her return to Europe. Isabel Plante, ‘Representations (and Dissemination) of Sexuality: Lea Lublin amid Local Censorship and International Circulation’, Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos (October 2017):  http://​journals.openedition.org/​nuevomundo/​7 1497 (accessed 17 January 2020). 93 For this exhibition, Lublin also created a sound piece entitled Polylogue extérieur (1974). This interwove her voice with those of the gallery owner Yvon Lambert, and the writers and critics Marcelin Pleynet and Philippe Sollers, as they discussed the relationships between art and cultural, social and ideological conflicts. See Lea Lublin, Marcelin Pleynet and Philippe Sollers, ‘Projet dedans/​dehors le musée’, Art Press 12 (June–​August 1974): 15–​16.

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94 Lea Lublin, ‘Entretien avec Gina Pane’, c. 1974–​77, video transferred to digital support, NUMAV-​328492; and ‘Entretien avec Nil Yalter’, c. 1974–​77, video transferred to digital support, NUMAV-​328486, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (BNF). In his detailed account of Lublin’s work in video, Thibault Boulvain states that these were screened at the Pompidou in 1979. Thibault Boulvain, ‘Take the Floor –​the Floor Is Yours’, in Lea Lublin–​Retrospective, ed. Mühling and Weber, 85 n. 58. 95 ‘Le travail de Lea Lublin présente indiscutablement un grand intérêt, tant par son aspect de document sociologique que pour le domaine largement inconnu encore de l’audiovisuel.’ Jean-​Paul Cassagnac, ‘Lea Lublin et Beaubourg …’, Vidéo info 13 (January–​February 1976):  33–​4 (33). Cassagnac strongly criticised Beaubourg’s limited support for Lublin’s work, citing this as indicative of the institution’s short-​sightedness and hierarchical attitude. Although Beaubourg did not open to the public until 1977, the project attracted significant controversy throughout the decade, as detailed in DeRoo, The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art, 167–​97. 96 The First Open Encounter was held at the ICA in London in 1974, as part of Latin American Week, programmed alongside Art Systems in Latin America. After the second meeting in Paris, the third took place at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, the fourth in Buenos Aires at the CAYC, and the fifth in Antwerp at the Internationaal Cultureel Centrum (ICC), all in 1975. 97 ‘L’art est-​il un désir? L’art est-​il une jouissance? L’art est-​il une sublimation? L’art est-​il une névrose? L’art est-​il un problème sexuel? L’art est-​il un phénomène religieux?’ Lea Lublin, ‘Séquence vidéo –​questions sur l’art, Neuenkirchen –​juin 1975’, in Une expérience socio-​écologique:  Photo–​film–​vidéo, Neuenkirchen 1975 (Paris: ARC, Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1975), n.p. 98 Lea Lublin, Pluchart Restany, Espace Cardin, c. 1974–​77, video transferred to digital support, NUMAV-​328542; and Lea Lublin, Debret, Martial Raysse, Catherine Millet, c. 1974–​77, video transferred to digital support, NUMAV-​328509, BNF. 99 Lublin, Debret, Martial Raysse, Catherine Millet. 100 A comparably fascinating video from the FIAC in 1975 features a group of French schoolchildren interviewing the performance artist Hannah Wilke. Facilitated by a precociously bilingual student, they candidly discuss everything from nudity in performance to the unequal and sexist treatment of women, and how Wilke gets paid for her work. Lea Lublin, Hannah Wilke, 1975, video transferred to digital support, NUMAV-​328490, BNF. 101 Lea Lublin, Art/​vidéo confrontation, 1974, video transferred to digital support, NUMAV-​328538,  BNF. 102 ‘Les définitions limite toujours les expériences.’ Unnamed interviewee, in Lea Lublin, Art/​vidéo, n.d., video transferred to digital support, NUMAV-​940300, BNF. 103 ‘très vite, le discours devient monologue, recherche sur soi-​même’. Dany Bloch, ‘Des archives vivantes’, Info ArTitudes 3 (December 1975): 14–​15 (15). 104 For a detailed analysis of the survey in French sociology, see Ruth Erickson, ‘Assembling Social Forms:  Sociological Art Practice in Post-​ 1968 France’

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(Ph.D.  thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 2014), 131–​ 207, https://​repository. upenn.edu/​cgi/​viewcontent.cgi?article=3082&context=edissertations (accessed 27 January 2020). Within the context of art production, Lori Cole highlights the questionnaire’s crucial role in forming and circulating conceptualisations of modernism in the Americas during the first part of the twentieth century, in Surveying the Avant-​Garde: Questions on Modernism, Art, and the Americas in Transatlantic Magazines (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018). 105 Erickson points to the influence of the sociology of art on the Collectif d’art sociologique. As well as her ‘Assembling Social Forms’, see also Ruth Erickson, ‘Sociological Art Practice in Post-​1968 France’, Perspectives on Europe 45, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 95–​9. 106 Jean Duvignaud, The Sociology of Art, trans. Timothy Wilson (London: Paladin, 1972 [1967]), 34. 107 The Collective emerged from discussions with other artists and the critics François Pluchart and Pierre Restany, who ultimately did not join. For a comprehensive account, see Erickson, ‘Assembling Social Forms’. 108 The April 1975 issue of Opus International featured a dossier on Sociological art compiled by the critic Bernard Teyssèdre, although by this point the relationship between critic and collective had imploded. It featured a detailed overview by Teyssèdre and contributions from figures including Forest. Bernard Teyssèdre, ‘L’Art sociologique’, Opus International 55 (April 1975): 16–​20, 22–​4, 26–​8; and in the same issue, Fred Forest, ‘Animation–​communication–​art sociologique’, 30–​1. Teyssèdre formed one of the links between Lublin and the collective, writing the catalogue essay for her 1975 ICC exhibition. 109 On Willats’s sociological approach to art making and interest in behaviourism and cybernetics, see Sharon Irish, ‘The Performance of Information Flows in the Art of Stephen Willats’, Information & Culture 47, no. 4 (2012): 457–​86. 110 Michael F. Leruth discusses this work in relation to Forest’s wider practice in Fred Forest’s Utopia: Media Art and Activism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 59. Tracing how video art of the 1970s emerged in critical dialogue with television and was used to disrupt hegemonic media narratives, William R. Kaizen points to the influence of the philosopher Vilém Flusser, in Against Immediacy:  Video Art and Media Populism (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2016), 20–​4. Flusser, who was born in Prague but lived for extended periods in Brazil and France, was also an important interlocutor for Sociological art. He argued that communications media formed an important tool for enabling self-​reflexive critique and social change. An insight into his thinking can be gained from twelve essays he composed in 1975 for a course on communication at the Theatre du Centre, Aix-​en-​Provence. In these essays, written in English, Flusser proposes that dialogic models of communication are essentially democratic, whereas discursive dissemination tends toward totalitarianism. He posited that, under the pressure of communications media, the mid-​1970s were witnessing a recodification of interaction, whereby ‘the world and its objects are no longer a text, but a set of relations

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or functions, like a map or a painting’. Vilém Flusser, The Surprising Phenomenon of Human Communication, ed. Rodrigo Maltez-​Novaes (Milton Keynes: Metaflux, 2016 [1975]), 54–​5. 111 There were also connections between the Collectif d’art sociologique and the CAYC. In 1977, they jointly attempted to present the Ecole sociologique interrogative at Documenta 6 (1977). The Collective was not included in the official programming because Beuys was already scheduled to present his Free University for Individual Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research, and the director Manfred Schneckenburger was worried about duplication (as perhaps in the case of Kaprow’s submission). Manfred Schneckenburger, letter to Hervé Fischer, 11 April 1977, in Hervé Fisher, Fred Forest and Jean-​Paul Thénot, Ecole sociologique interrogative:  Animée par le Collectif d’art sociologique; association loi de 1901 (Buenos Aires: Centro de Arte y Comunicación, 1977), n.p. Glusberg gave a talk at the Ecole in 1977. Ecole sociologique interrogative, announcement for ‘Pratique artistique –​pratique sociologique, par Jorge Glusberg’, 8 March 1977, Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC), Collection of Press Releases and Ephemera, 1969–​ 1977, Museum of Modern Art Library, New York, Box 2, Folder 12. 112 Distinction expanded Bourdieu’s previous work on the reproduction of cultural capital through education, offering a wide-​ranging sociological study of how museums and cultural institutions are deeply classed: ‘the encounter with a work of art … presupposes an act of cognition, a decoding operation, which implies the implementation of a cognitive acquirement, a cultural code’. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction:  A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London:  Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984 [1979]), 3. This resonates with Lublin’s desire to demystify art objects, museum institutions and the wider cultural field. 113 ‘notre attitude consiste non seulement à déborder la catégorie “art” … mais aussi à questionner et mettre en doute le discours sociologique universitaire dont nous nous servons, en lui opposant en retour la réalité concrète des expériences réalisées’. Hervé Fischer, ‘Théorie de l’art sociologique’, in Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest and Jean-​Paul Thénot, Collectif art sociologique: Théorie–​pratique–​critique (Paris: Musée Galliéra, 1975), 19. 114 Ruth Erickson, ‘Autogestion in French Art after 1968: A Case Study of the Sociological Art Collective’, in France and the Visual Arts since 1945:  Remapping European Postwar and Contemporary Art, ed. Catherine Dossin (London:  Bloomsbury, 2019), 211–​25 (221). Lublin’s interview with the Brazilian economist Celso Furtado on the art market featured alongside materials by Hans Haacke, Les Levine and Adrian Piper in Art sociologique I: L’Art et ses structures socio-​économiques at the Galerie Germain in January 1975. It is unclear whether this took the form a transcript, or the video of Furtado shot at the ARC. Lea Lublin, Discours sur l’art II, video transferred to digital support, 1974–​75, NUMAV-​328511, BNF. In the second exhibition at Galerie Mathias Fels in March 1975, Lublin was represented by extracts from a debate conducted with the Collective during the previous exhibition. ‘Liste des documents présentés à l’initiative du Collectif d’art sociologique’, in Problèmes et méthodes de l’art sociologique:  A l’initiative du Collectif d’art

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sociologique (Paris: Galerie Mathias Fels, 1975), n.p. Lublin also produced a text in conjunction with her involvement: see Lea Lublin, ‘Entre tiens/​lecture d’un débat sociologique’, Vidéo info 11 (June–​August 1975): 20. 115 The ARC, which stood for Animation–​recherche–​confrontation, was founded in 1967 within the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris to engage with contemporary production. DeRoo, The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art, 41. 116 ‘dans l’objectif de créer une communication art-​village’. Susanne Pagé, in Une expérience socio-​écologique, n.p. 117 Fred Forest and Hervé Fischer, entries in ibid. 118 Lublin explained that in presenting Interrogations sur l’art:  Discours sur l’art outside the supermarket, she sought to create ‘an action that documents and restores a discourse –​a gesture. A reaction at the level of perception/​reflection on questions about art’ as much as a social study (‘cette séquence vidéo est une action qui enregistre et restitue un discours –​un geste. Une réaction au niveau de la perception/​réflexion sur les questions à propos de l’art, en tant que pratique sociale spécifique’) (emphasis in the original). Lea Lublin, ‘Interrogation sur l’art’, in ibid. For an account of the exhibition, see Dany Bloch, ‘Un art de communication’, Info ArTitudes 2 (November 1975): 13–​14. This aspect of Lublin’s work and that of the Collectif d’art sociologique has roots in the Situationist engagement with the everyday life of the street; see in particular Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1998). 119 See Bernard Teyssèdre, ‘Le Parcours de Lea Lublin’, in Lea Lublin: Parcours, 1965–​ 1975 (Antwerp: Internationaal Cultureel Centrum, 1975), 1–​12. 120 Lea Lublin, Interrogations sur l’art, Vogelmarkt (2), 1975, video transferred to digital support, NUMAV-​328500, BNF. 121 The artists John Dugger, Cecilia Vicuña and David Medalla, and the critic Guy Brett formed AFD in the wake of the 1973 Chilean coup, when General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. The collaboration underscores the transnational connections of Lublin’s practice. 122 John Howkins, ‘The Video Show’, in The Video Show: Festival of Independent Video at the Serpentine Gallery (London:  Serpentine Gallery, 1975), n.p. CAYC, Juan Downey and Fred Forest also participated. 123 Margaret Atack speculates that ‘May 68, and theoretical reflexion on it, belongs primarily to the sociologists.’ Margaret Atack, ‘Edgar Morin and the Sociology of May 68’, French Cultural Studies 8 (1997): 285–​307 (301). 124 Alain Touraine, The Post-​Industrial Society: Tomorrow’s Social History –​Classes, Conflicts and Culture in the Programmed Society, trans. Leonard F.  X. Mayhew (London:  Wildwood House, 1974 [1969]), 228. Touraine took direct aim at the university’s role in ‘the programmed society’ with his chapter ‘The Crisis of the University’, in Alain Touraine, The May Movement: Revolt and Reform. May 1968–​ the Student Rebellion and Workers’ Strikes–​the Birth of a Social Movement, trans. Leonard F. X. Mayhew (New York: Random House, 1971 [1968]), 82–​119. 125 Touraine, The Post-​Industrial Society, 229.

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126 Ibid., 233. 127 Fischer contended that Sociological art was materialist rather than psychoanalytic, rejecting understandings of artistic production as the expression of lack or libidinal desire. Fischer, ‘Théorie de l’art sociologique’, 16–​17. Later, however, he pointed to the connections between Sociological art and therapy, arguing that while ‘sociological art seems to be a collective art, which talks about everyone and questions society’, it in fact involved an approach ‘that is basically quite individual … paradoxically, for me, sociological art has been a sort of self-​analysis or group therapy, not in going on the psychoanalyst’s couch … but by confronting the real world, the problems of others, and society’. Hervé Fischer, interview by Sophie Duplaix, 8 December 2016, in Hervé Fischer et l’art sociologique, ed. Sophie Duplaix, trans. John Tyler Tuttle (Paris: Centre Pompidou and Manuella Editions, 2017), 9–​29 (13). 128 ‘de se reconnaître devant cet écran-​miroir que je tends au sujet en tant que corps parlent’. Lea Lublin, ‘Texte-​pièce:  A la mémoire de Joël Delouche, mort accidentellement’, ArTitudes International 30/​32 (January–​May 1976): 16–​19 (16). This parallels Rosalind E. Krauss’s influential contention that the medium of artists working in video in the early 1970s, such as Joan Jonas and Vito Acconci, was the psychological state of narcissism. Rosalind E.  Krauss, ‘Video:  The Aesthetics of Narcissism’, October 1 (Spring 1976): 50–​67 (57). 129 ‘d’un discours révélateur de ses propres conflits, de ses contradictions, conscientes ou inconscientes (voire idéologiques), de traces inscrites, des gestes, des discours, vestiges d’un refoulé qui se débat à travers sa censure, à travers sa répression’. Lublin, ‘Texte-​pièce’, 16. 130 See for example Lublin’s contributions to a joint exhibition with Orlan, in Orlan, Lea Lublin: Histoires saintes de l’art (Cergy: Lacertidé, 1985). This aspect of Lublin’s work is explored in Jessica Freeman-​Attwood, ‘Purity, Danger, Pleasure:  Lea Lublin in the Context of French Feminism, 1968–​83’ (M.A.  thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 2016). 131 Although Lublin distanced herself from Body art, her work can be positioned in the network of relations between it and Sociological art. In 1973, Pluchart recorded a discussion on the convergences and disjunctions between the two approaches, subsequently published in ArTitudes, the magazine he had founded in 1971. See Hervé Fischer, Michel Journiac, Gina Pane and Jean-​Paul Thénot, ‘Dix questions sur l’art corporel et l’art sociologique’, ArTitudes International 6/8 (December 1973–​March 1974): 4–​17. In the exchange, differences of opinion are marked, with Journiac stressing that the participants did not constitute a ‘school’ of practice or thought (‘nous ne sommes pas une école’) (10). 132 Nil Yalter, in Une expérience socio-​écologique, n.p. 133 11 Mars, action de 5 femmes, 1978, video transferred to digital support, NUMAV-​512417,  BNF. 134 Janicot is perhaps best known for her performance L’Encoconnage (1972), during which she cocooned herself from head to toe in string until it became almost impossible to breathe.

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135 This drew on Tan’s employment in a handbag-​making factory. Rakhee Balaram, ‘Femmes révolutionnaires: The Politics of Women’s Art, Theory and Practice in 1970s France’ (Ph.D.  thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 2008), 242. 136 ‘La femme est-​elle une putain? … Une propriété privée?’ 137 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (London: Routledge, 1997 [1949]), 283. 138 For Françoise Eliet, Lublin’s work was fundamentally concerned with interrogating systems of representation in a manner that closely aligned with women’s liberation (‘jusqu’à Tania Mouraud ou Léa Lublin qui, de nos jours, s’interrogent, de manière différente, sur les fondements de la représentation’). Françoise Eliet, ‘Peindre/​combattre’, Sorcières 10 (1977): 21–​4 (21). 139 Cecilia Fajardo-​Hill argues that the inclusion of Latin American women artists such as Lublin and Minujín in feminist survey shows such as WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution of 2007, while important for raising visibility, risks homogenisation. For Fajardo-​Hill, such exhibitions were ‘formulated under the banner of international feminism, without clarifying the difference between a feminist framework and actual feminist art. In fact, most of the Latin American women artists shown in these exhibitions do not consider their work to be feminist.’ Cecilia Fajardo-​Hill, ‘The Invisibility of Latin American Women Artists: Problematizing Art Historical and Curatorial Practices’, in Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–​1985, ed. Cecilia Fajardo-​Hill and Andrea Giunta (Los Angeles:  Hammer Museum, 2017), 21–​7 (24). 140 ‘A ce point de mon travail artistique, un événement inattendu vient bouleverser ma vie individuelle, ma vie d’artiste: la maternité avec ses profondes transformations organiques, ses joies, ses craintes.’ Lublin, ‘La Créativité ou les organes invisibles’, 47. 141 ‘Culture faite du refoulement de la femme, de son image’. Ibid., 50. 142 In terms that reverberate with Mon fils, Kristeva opens ‘Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini’ with a depiction of pregnancy as inherently multiple, entailing splitting and self-​othering: ‘cells fuse, split, and proliferate; volumes grow, tissues stretch, and body fluids change rhythm, speeding up or slowing down. Within the body, growing as a graft, indomitable, there is an other.’ Julia Kristeva, ‘Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini’ (1975), in Desire in Language:  A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 237–​70 (237). 143 Luce Irigaray, This Sex which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter, with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985 [1977]), 28. 144 As exemplified by Hélène Cixous in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1975), which asserts of woman that:  ‘there is always within her at least a little of that good mother’s milk. She writes in white ink.’ Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 875–​93 (881).

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145 ‘Woman’, Beauvoir stated, ‘is not a completed reality, but rather a becoming’. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 66. 146 A flyer for another Femmes/​Art event lists Lublin as a discussant. Collectif Femmes/​ Art, announcement, 7 January [‘1978’ added in pen], Box 3, 1977, Documents Hervé Fischer, Bibliothèque Kandinsky. Lublin’s article for the Sorcières special issue appeared alongside contributions by Eliet and Tan. 147 Fabienne Dumont, Des sorcières comme les autres:  Artistes et féministes dans la France des années 1970 (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2014), 119. 148 See Femmes/​ Art, texte collectif, ‘Enfermement/​ Rupture’, first published in Bulletin no.  1 du collectif Femmes/​Art (October 1977), in Dumont, Des sorcières comme les autres, 471–​3. For a detailed history of the collective, see Diana Quinby, ‘Le Collectif Femmes/​Art à Paris dans les années 1970:  Une contribution à l’étude du mouvement des femmes dans l’art’ (Ph.D. thesis, Université Paris I-​Panthéon-​Sorbonne,  2003). 149 Femmes/​Art frequently deployed the tactic of short, ephemeral, women-​only studio exhibitions. Reviewing one such in 1978, Anne Tronche decreed the result less an expression of a shared politics than a practical solution to the exclusion of women from galleries and museums in France (‘ne défendant pas une idée de l’art ou de l’expression qui leur paraît frappée d’exception, leur rencontre placée sous le signe des amitiés électives apporte une simple et dynamique réponse aux contraintes que font peser sur bon nombre d’artistes les structures pesantes d’un circuit de diffusion essoufflé’). Anne Tronche, ‘Exposition dans un atelier’, Opus International 69 (June 1978): 87–​8 (88). 150 Dumont, Des sorcières comme les autres, 120. Psychanalyse et politique courted controversy because of its separatism, dismissal of activist feminism, and 1979 move to copyright the MLF name and logo. 151 This was a common theme in statements connected to the group, with Eliet foregrounding their criticism of the essentialist position (‘critique donc de la position essentialiste’). Françoise Eliet, ‘Femmes/​Art’, Art Press International 16 (March 1978): 42–​3 (42). 152 ‘Comme femmes, nous sommes opprimées politiquement, socialement, économiquement.’ Femmes/​Art, ‘Enfermement/​Rupture’, 472. Toward the end of the Action de 5 femmes video, the camera focuses on a text applied to the studio windows, which reads:  ‘The struggle of women is linked to the class struggle /​ only the reactionary man is the enemy.’ (‘La lutte des femmes est liée à la lutte des classes /​seul l’homme réactionnaire est l’ennemi.’) 11 Mars, action de 5 femmes.

Conclusion: Breaching experiments and social bodies

By the mid-​ 1960s, the Happening was being busily anthologised and historicised, dissected and disputed in journals, broadcast on television, and mimicked in advertising campaigns. Yet practitioners continued to experiment with the form, pushing it into alternative pedagogy, psychology and sociology. In their hands, the Happening became a means of investigating, and potentially remaking, interpersonal communication. As artists moved beyond the Happening, particularly in relation to conceptualism and video, complicating the construct of an ‘originary moment’ through their creative networking across the globe, they did not entirely dispense with the structures of earlier works. Instead, they retooled them to further what Jill Johnston, as outlined in the introduction to this book, had perceptively identified early on as the Happening’s preoccupation with communication:  bodily and verbal, physical and psychic, its barriers and breakdowns as well as its possibilities. In so doing, Allan Kaprow, Marta Minujín, Carolee Schneemann and Lea Lublin directly contributed to the heterogeneous, wide-​ranging discourse of communication studies that blossomed in conjunction with the growing globalisation and interconnectivity of the postwar period. Their contributions were attuned to the geopolitical dynamics that conditioned interactive paradigms, whether this was the connection between cybernetics and warfare, or the imbalances of US-​dominated cultural internationalism. While the performances after the Happenings of the late 1950s and early 1960s might often be overlooked as strange, outmoded, outdated or derivative, lacking the impact and iconicity of earlier works such as 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, such dismissals obscure their vitally critical and self-​reflective character, and sustained engagement with interpersonal politics across multiple contexts, from the classroom to the world’s fair, the street to the academic conference. Beyond the Happening has focused on works that brought multiple people together, whether groups of strangers, collaborations over time, or encounters between preidentified communities. In pushing past the early treatment of participants as ‘material objects’, toward more nuanced, variegated frameworks

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for human interaction, the Happening’s transformation of group relations into artistic material had long-​lasting implications.1 The resulting works, intimately linked as they were to developments and divergences in sociologies and psychologies of communication, spanned a variegated terrain that is neither straightforwardly utopian, nor overwhelmingly repressive. Instead, Kaprow, Minujín, Schneemann and Lublin treated communication as a multivalent state that could be constantly reformulated. Within these shifts and changes, the body was always present, and increasingly became a tool in its own right. This aspect comes into particular focus with Schneemann’s and Lublin’s practices. The exploration of the body’s capacity to illuminate, and by extension potentially rupture, received social norms is perhaps one of the longest-​lasting concerns to have emerged from the interdisciplinary encounters of the 1960s and 1970s, which continues to find powerful expression in the work of artists using performance. We might turn, for example, to Real Snow White (2009), for which the artist Pilvi Takala dressed herself to look like the character from the 1937 Disney animated film and approached the gates of Disneyland Paris (Figure 5.1). A video shot by a cameraperson disguised in the crowd documents Takala walking toward the entrance, whereupon she is mobbed by an excited scrum of queuing tourist families who press her for autographs and pictures. Although Takala’s costume has been painstakingly put together, it is also evidently handmade. A cursory glance reveals that the puff sleeves poking out of the bodice have been somewhat hastily contrived by loosely placing strips of blue ribbon on top of red material. Yet the necessary coordinates are in place for Takala to pass as an ‘official’ park actor for the majority of visitors. While she does not make any special effort to play-​act as Snow White  –​Takala at one point states to the assembled crowd that she is simply trying to visit the park –​she also acknowledges their pleas, taking the books and pens proffered eagerly by children and scrawling a signature, offering a smilingly benign and amenable screen for the fantasies and desires swirling around her.2 The trouble begins when a security guard approaches Takala and explains that she cannot enter the park dressed in character, because this will –​as the attention she is already receiving demonstrates –​confuse children and families who might think she is a ‘real’ Disney personage. Others join the debate, but throughout the video people continue to approach Takala and interact with her as if she is Snow White. Takala tests the rule operative inside the park that adults cannot dress as characters because they might act in a way that reflects badly on the Disney brand. At the liminal site outside the entrance, Takala’s behaviour is not technically illegal, but does prove disruptive, transforming a tacit notion into a physical barrier. Real Snow White homes in on a tenet specific to the Disney Corporation’s management of its parks, but also exposes the performance structures governing everyday interaction, showing how

Conclusion

Pilvi Takala, Real Snow White, 2009, video.

these are often paradoxically malleable yet concrete, formulated according to arbitrary rules that are nonetheless tangible and deeply constrictive in their operations. Takala’s The Trainee (2008) addresses this even more explicitly. The work was produced in conjunction with the international accounting and financial advisory organisation Deloitte.3 For this month-​long performance, Takala posed as the intern ‘Johanna Takala’ in the company’s Helsinki office. During her placement, Takala increasingly indulged in behaviours that departed from accepted and hence acceptable forms of work. These included sitting in her chair and staring into space without bothering to hide behind a computer screen (Figure 5.2), or riding up and down in the lift all day. When challenged to justify her actions, Takala explained that she was thinking. Only a few people knew Takala was conducting an art project, and hidden cameras reveal how many employees became angry and upset about her non-​normative way of working.4 But as Sami Siegelbaum elucidates, the labour Takala performed both within the parameters of the specific piece, and more generally as an artist, corresponds with the flexibility, creativity and so-​called ‘out-​of-​the-​box’ or ‘blue-​sky’ thinking purportedly embraced by advanced capitalist service providers such as Deloitte.5 While The Trainee might reveal the hollowness of ‘creative’ business protocols, it also shows how behaviours in multiple working environments –​from financial services to the art world –​are carefully policed and controlled.

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Pilvi Takala, The Trainee, 2008, installation, three videos with a duration of 13:52 minutes, powerpoint presentation, key card and letter.

In his 1971 book Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order, Erving Goffman proposed that: ‘the world around the individual is highly social in character. Its features are there by virtue of the socially organized training the individual has obtained and by virtue of some kind of collective guarantee regarding the material and human elements in the situation.’6 This makes it seem as if ‘a bubble or capsule of events … follow[s]‌the individual around’, although Goffman stresses that, ‘actually, of course, what is changing is not the position of events but their at-​handed-​ness; what looks like an envelope of events is really something like a moving wave front of relevance’.7 These everyday interactions intersect with and produce notions of normative behaviour linked to constructs of gender, ableism (construed in relation to both physical and mental states), class, race and sexuality, and have long been connected in turn to the repressive pathologisation of communication that frustrates easily intelligible feedback loops, as addressed in Chapter 3. Takala’s actions in The Trainee disrupt this coherent but highly contingent web of relations, forcing those around her to consider the disconcertingly arbitrary nature of the structures that condition their interactions. The destabilising potentialities –​and, conversely, the boundaries of Takala’s breach –​are manifested in the palpably fearful response of her coworkers.

Conclusion

The Trainee constitutes a particularly sharp deployment of the breaching technique elaborated in sociological and psychological studies of interpersonal communication during the late 1950s and 1960s by Harold Garfinkel.8 Like Goffman, Garfinkel believed that sociologists and psychologists had not paid enough attention to the rules and regulations shaping everyday interaction, or to the fieldworker’s enmeshed position within the very systems of power and control that they set out to study. He contended that, ‘since each of the expectancies that make up the attitude of daily life assigns an expected feature to the actor’s environment, it should be possible to breach these expectancies by deliberately modifying scenic events so as to disappoint these attributions’.9 For one task, Garfinkel instructed his students to return to their family homes and act like a lodger rather than a child of the household. In almost every instance the situation escalated rapidly, as parents reacted with ‘astonishment, bewilderment, shock, anxiety, embarrassment, and anger’ to what they read as the sudden unfathomable detachment and superciliousness of their offspring.10 They frantically sought explanations, bombarding the students with questions such as: ‘What’s the matter? What’s gotten into you? Did you get fired? Are you sick? What are you being so superior about? Why are you mad? Are you out of your mind or are you just stupid?’11 The Trainee achieves just such a break between expectations and experience, illuminating ingrained assumptions by breaching them. Yet Takala’s position within Deloitte was enabled by the critical capital that the company could extract from their association with contemporary art. Deloitte stood to gain by implementing Takala as a tool through which to gauge the receptiveness of their employees to behaviour that was perceived as unusual, and thereby covertly test the cherished attributes of flexibility and adaptation.12 Just as Takala’s performances are conditioned by the pre-​existing structures of the social situations in which she intervenes, notably in terms of how these produce her whiteness, gender and class position, so too do the works themselves risk becoming means of disciplinary control. The Trainee might be read as an extended version of Happenings such as Kaprow’s Fine!, or Lublin’s displacement in Mon fils. An important parallel practice, which helps plot the connections between the works in Beyond the Happening and contemporary interventions, can be found in the performances that Adrian Piper conducted in New  York City in the early 1970s, notably her influential Catalysis series. These pieces, which, as Nizan Shaked elucidates, grew out of Piper’s involvement in Conceptual art, saw the artist manipulate her physical presence and move through public spaces including buses, trains, streets, department stores and exhibition openings.13 In Catalysis I, Piper soaked her clothes in a pungent mixture of vinegar, eggs, milk and cod-​liver oil for a week, before wearing them on the New  York subway during the evening rush hour, and while browsing the Marboro

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bookstore.14 In photographs of Catalysis IV taken by Rosemary Mayer, Piper sits on a bus with a wad of towel flowering from her mouth like an aberrant ectoplasm, and for Catalysis II parts a crowded street with clothes covered in sticky white paint and a sign saying ‘WET PAINT’ (Figure 5.3). The camera, crucially, also catches the perturbed responses of passers-​by, as their eyes snag on the outlandish details that Piper has inserted into their physical surroundings using her body, indicating that their reaction is a vital part of the overall project.

5.3

Adrian Piper, Catalysis III, 1970. Performance documentation: three silver gelatin print photographs on baryta paper (reprints 1998), 16 in × 16 in (40.6 cm × 40.6 cm). Detail: photograph no. 1 of 3.

Conclusion

Piper situated the Catalysis works in relation to previous ‘events and happening-​type situations’, while warning that performance art often shared the limitations of more discrete art forms such as painting and sculpture: When an artificial environment is created, the viewer relinquishes his role as essentially passive ‘substance’ on which the catalytic agent works in order to become part of the catalytic agent. In either case the potential impact of the work is diminished: In the former case, the final work is incomplete; in the latter, the role of the viewer is incomplete (being temporarily superseded by the role of ‘participating artist’).15

Piper’s solution was to dissolve the artificiality of the Happening through presenting herself as an art object to audiences who had not been primed to expect anything. This approach strikes a different note from Kaprow’s attempts to merge art and life during the 1970s and 1980s, instead aspiring to interrupt received social patterns and protocols.16 Piper envisaged the artist as a ‘catalytic agent inducing change in the viewer; the viewer responds to the catalytic presence of the artist as artwork. This is not to be confused with life as art or the artist’s personality as art.’17 This desire to enter into a ‘a nonart situation’ indicates the extent to which performance art did not simply respond to the increased cultural understanding of everyday interaction and communication as performative, but actively analysed this process, particularly through experiments that refuted the softening frameworks of theatrical convention or the gallery space.18 Shaked underscores that Piper’s Catalysis performances were not an ‘assertion of personal identity, but rather of conditions to be observed as social impositions, the sites where inequality and oppression manifested’.19 Although Piper’s works reveal the conditioning of social interaction through the prisms of race and gender, and the effects of racism and sexism, the Catalysis performances do not undertake a subjective exploration of blackness, gender or class position, but rather study the intermeshing of societal structures through which exclusions and divisions come into being and enforce their exclusory effects.20 In an interview with Lucy R. Lippard, Piper described how, through the Catalysis pieces, she seemed ‘to have gotten more aware of the boundaries of my personality, and how much I intrude myself upon other people’s realities by introducing this kind of image, this façade, and a lot of things happen to me psychologically’.21 The experiment threatened to descend into ‘universal solipsism … where you can’t be sure whether what you are seeing is of your own making, or whether it is objectively true’.22 This was frightening and exhilarating, in that it indicated the catalytic agent’s power to reveal the relativism of experience, while suggesting that the smallest of physical alterations might have the capacity to stimulate significant interpersonal change. Uri McMillan perceptively argues, however, that while ‘objecthood … generated a freedom

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of movement for Piper’, her performances of the early 1970s could not always escape the pressures of objectification and its very ‘opposite effects’ emanating from the audiences, particularly the effects of the racialising and/​or sexualising gaze, as a result of which the breaching capacities of Piper’s transformation into art object sometimes ‘slowed, stuttered, and stopped’.23 This fine line between objecthood and objectification is one that performance works exploring the politics of communication have constantly bumped up against and sought to address. Pope.L has comparably implemented social breaching to intervene in behavioural patterning, exploring the competing interdependency and disjunction between individual and social bodies, in a way that expands on the history traced by Beyond the Happening.24 ATM Piece (1997) applies pressure to the points at which, as Goffman might put it, notions of normative public interaction become so tight as to produce overt policing by other members of society, as well as private and State security apparatuses.25 For this work, Pope.L, wearing only a skirt made of dollar notes and a pair of boots, tied himself to the door of a cashpoint near Grand Central Station using a string of raw sausages, and attempted to confound the social expectations surrounding this staple of urban architecture by offering users a dollar note as they navigated past him to get inside. Like Takala’s appearance at the boundary of Disneyland Paris, Pope.L’s gesture tested a downtown Manhattan antisoliciting law that prevented anyone from loitering within ten feet of an ATM. Pope.L’s costume lampooned and inverted this dictate, the implication being that he would gradually have been ‘stripped’ of his dollars, simultaneously invoking and deflating the overblown cultural stereotypes and fantasies projected onto black masculinity.26 Like Real Snow White, Pope.L’s provocation quickly drew the attention of security guards who removed him from the scene. The significantly higher stakes were indicated by the rapidity with which Pope.L, an African American man, was apprehended; as a young white woman, Takala’s removal was far less violent. Darby English observes that, although many commentators have described Pope.L’s wide-​ranging practice –​ which incorporates performance, drawing, installations and environments –​as ‘uncategorizable’, his work is more accurately understood as a sustained meditation on the problem of categories, specifically ‘our experience and use of them in the context of determinate social relations’.27 Pope.L has referred to performance art as a ‘canary in the coal mine’, and while he made this statement regarding the deadening effects of institutionalisation, it eloquently encapsulates his use of the form to test the highly mutable restrictions demarcating permissible behaviour in public urban spaces, and their inversely intense regulation through definitions of gender, sexuality, race and class.28 Pope.L’s formulation conveys performance art’s capacity to alert audiences, whether knowingly constituted art observers or random passers-​by, to how their modalities as social entities are subliminally and overtly constrained.29

Conclusion

233

The limits and possibilities of the works addressed in Beyond the Happening have also been insightfully addressed through reperformance. Otobong Nkanga, like Pope.L, has a varied practice that spans performance, installation, drawing, sculpture and relational propositions. During 2007, in conjunction with the large-​scale travelling retrospective Allan Kaprow  –​Art as Life, Nkanga created a response to his 1972 Happening Baggage through a series of reinventions organised by the Kunsthalle Bern. Kaprow’s original score directed a group of students from Rice University in Houston to drive to an airport with tagged suitcases of ‘packaged sand’, place them on an airport train, wait for it to return and unload them again at random. They transported the suitcases to the seashore and emptied out the sand, refilling each one with grains from the beach. The suitcases were then handed over to the United Parcel Service, who delivered them back to their owners.30 For her version, Nkanga, born in Nigeria and living and working in the Netherlands, transported sand from locations including a street in Amsterdam, the side of a highway undergoing construction in Utrecht (Figure  5.4) and a beach in Zandvoort, to the port city of Lagos.

Otobong Nkanga, Baggage, 2007, reinvention of Allan Kaprow’s Happening Baggage, 1972, at various locations in the Netherlands and Lagos, Nigeria, commissioned by Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, in conjunction with the exhibition Allan Kaprow –​Art as Life.

5.4

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Nkanga has recounted:  ‘I did Baggage as a personal thing … Felt like a smuggler. It was a nightmare and it was fun. Why the hell did I do this?’31 While the establishment of the Schengen Area between European Union (EU) member states enabled the dissolution of borders and free movement within the Continent through a common visa policy, this has had the effect of strengthening and militarising the boundary around the EU. Nkanga’s narrative links her version to border crossing and control, specifically the policing of migration between Africa and Europe. For Philippe Pirotte, who curated the reperformances, Nkanga’s Baggage ‘re-​politicizes’ Kaprow’s score by focusing attention on uneven access to globalised movement.32 Equally, Nkanga treated the commission as an opportunity to satisfy her own curiosity –​to pursue a ‘personal thing’ –​a methodology that echoes Piper’s articulation of the artist-​as-​catalyst. Nkanga’s anxiety about transporting the sand through airport security, and across the increasingly hard border around the EU, correlates with the worry Piper reported in conducting the Catalysis works:  ‘I was really having trouble looking people in the eye while I  was doing it; it was very hairy.’33 If, as Monika Szewczyk observes, Nkanga’s work investigates an ‘emblematics of colonial capitalism’ (italics in original), then her version of Baggage leverages the discomfort she experienced in using her own body to meditate on the legacies of imperialism, and its continued operation in the borders and boundaries constructed around nation states and continental blocs.34 Nkanga’s extension of the piece, whereby the artist sent sand from Lagos back to the Netherlands via DHL, and proceeded to distribute it to attendees at performances in small envelopes (which also contained photographs of the sand dispersing on the Lagos beach in the wind and water), prompted audiences to reflect on their own imbrication in these wider structures. Nkanga’s reinvention did not constitute a strict breaching experiment, in that she never explicitly revealed the behaviour that risked being deemed idiosyncratic, suspect and even threatening, especially when conducted by a person of colour. However, the need to hide the action powerfully conveys how borders operate as both highly abstract and brutally tangible entities, with unequal and arbitrary repercussions. We might consider her reperformance a necessarily repressed breaching experiment, which carries Kaprow’s interest in the analysis of interpersonal relations into the changed conditions of the contemporary moment, while exposing the ingrained assumptions about embodied subjectivity underpinning the earlier work. In the scenarios developed by Piper, Takala, Pope.L and Nkanga, we see the concerns of Kaprow, Minujín, Schneemann and Lublin continued, deepened and questioned. For all the differences among these artists’ works, they are united by their concern with the overlap between communication and socialisation, and with how embodied interaction can concretise into normative expectations, even

Conclusion

as they reveal their constructed nature. This generative paradox staged by the Happenings continues to energise performance art, decades after their purported demise. Notes 1 Susan Sontag, ‘Happenings:  An Art of Radical Juxtaposition’ (1962), in ‘Against Interpretation’ and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), 267. 2 Takala generally establishes a set of rules for her roles, so that they have their own internal logic. Pilvi Takala, interview by Silke Opitz, in Pilvi Takala:  Just when I  Thought I  Was Out … They Pull Me Back In, ed. and trans. Silke Opitz (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz and Kunsthalle Erfurt, 2012), 104–​19 (109). 3 The Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki brokered the partnership, of which Deloitte was a corporate sponsor; Deloitte ultimately purchased the work. 4 As Takala observes: ‘masking laziness in apparent activity and browsing Facebook during working hours belong to the acceptable behavioural patterns of a work community. However, sitting in front of an empty desk with your hands [in] your lap, just thinking, threatens the peace of the community and breaks the colleagues’ concentration.’ Pilvi Takala, ‘The Trainee, 2008’, https://​pilvitakala.com/​the-​trainee/​ (accessed 27 November 2018). 5 Sami Siegelbaum, ‘Business Casual: Flexibility in Contemporary Performance Art’, Art Journal 72, no. 3 (2013): 48–​63 (52). 6 Erving Goffman, Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order (London: Allen Lane, 1971), 250. 7 Ibid., 255. 8 Takala cites the concept of the breaching experiment as a direct inspiration for her work. Pilvi Takala, ‘Open Access’, interview by Catherine Spencer, Art Monthly 397 (June 2016): 1–​4 (2). 9 Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:  Prentice-​ Hall, 1967), 57. 10 Ibid., 47. 11 Ibid. 12 Siegelbaum, ‘Business Casual’, 53. 13 Nizan Shaked, The Synthetic Proposition: Conceptualism and the Political Referent in Contemporary Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 60–​112. 14 These performances predate, but offer a suggestive commentary on, Stanley Milgram’s New  York subway breaching experiments. Under Milgram’s direction, a group of sociology graduates broke the implicit rules that seats in subway cars are filled on a first-​come, first-​served basis, and that passengers who do not know each other do not talk to each other, by asking fellow travellers to give up their seats. Stanley Milgram and John Sabini, ‘On Maintaining Urban Norms: A Field Experiment in the Subway’, in Advances in Environmental Psychology, Vol. I: The Urban Environment, ed. Andrew Baum, Jerome E. Singer and Stuart Valins

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(Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1978), 31–​40. The differences, however, are illuminating:  the Catalysis works did not stage an explicit intervention in the same way, and, as John P. Bowles points out, placed the onus on the viewer to ‘become aware of their biases and desires’ and reconsider their responses, rather than illuminating a predetermined norm. John P. Bowles, Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, and Embodiment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 20. 15 Adrian Piper, ‘Talking to Myself: The Ongoing Autobiography of an Art Object’ (1970–​73), in Out of Order, Out of Sight, Vol. I: Selected Writings in Meta-​Art, 1968–​ 1992 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 29–​53 (34). 16 That said, Kaprow’s later writings, notably his three-​part essay ‘The Education of the Un-​Artist’, contain correlations with Piper’s aim to operate beyond the constraints of art-​world protocols: ‘Art. There’s the catch. At this stage of consciousness, the sociology of Culture emerges as an in-​group “dumb-​show”. Its sole audience is a roster of the creative and performing professions watching itself, as if in a mirror.’ Allan Kaprow, ‘The Education of the Un-​Artist, Part I’ (1971), in Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 97–​109 (103). 17 Piper, ‘Talking to Myself ’, 34. 18 Ibid., 37. 19 Shaked, The Synthetic Proposition, 105. 20 On this see also Kobena Mercer, ‘Contrapositional Becomings:  Adrian Piper Performs Questions of Identity’, in Cornelia H. Butler, David Platzker, Jörg Heiser, Nizan Shaked, Kobena Mercer, Diarmuid Costello et al., Adrian Piper: A Reader (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2018), 102–​31. 21 Adrian Piper, ‘Catalysis’, interview by Lucy R. Lippard, The Drama Review: TDR 16, no. 1 (March 1972): 76–​8 (77). 22 Ibid. 23 Uri McMillan, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (New  York:  New  York University Press, 2015), 137. On Catalysis see also Bowles, Adrian Piper, 162–​204. 24 Pope.L has spoken of his debts to practitioners such as Kaprow and Geoff Hendricks, his tutor at Rutgers University, and cited Joseph Beuys and Piper as artists he feels ‘an affinity with’. William Pope.L, ‘America’s Friendliest Black Artist’, interview by Chris Thompson, PAJ:  A Journal of Performance and Art 24, no. 3 (September 2002): 68–​72 (72). 25 Goffman conceived of the codification of norms as fundamentally linked to a scale of sanctions ranging from those imposed by the self and the immediate family unit, to members of the public, through to state organisations such as the police, the law and the medical profession. Goffman, Relations in Public, 96. 26 Pope.L deploys the acronym ‘BAM’ to refer to the black male body, an entity that he conceives as marked by lack, but, Pope.L contends, ‘a lack worth having’: ‘masculinity is measured in presence. However, no matter how much presence the BAM contrives, it will continue to be marked as lack. This is the dilemma for the

Conclusion

BAM. On the one hand, being male connotes a certain privilege and presence. On the other hand, being black connotes a certain subordination and lack.’ William Pope.L, interview by Lowery Stokes Sims, in William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Artist in America, ed. Mark H.  C. Bessire (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press and the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, 2002), 62–​7 (62). 27 Darby English, How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 259. 28 William Pope.L, ‘Canary in the Coal Mine’, Art Journal 70, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 55–​8 (57). 29 As Shannon Jackson notes, his work ‘does not always fit neatly within performance art’s signature frames’. When invited to participate in a colloquium entitled ‘Live’ at the Tate Modern in London, Pope.L ‘spoke only in gibberish’ throughout. As such, Pope.L’s practice pushes against the ways in which performance art might settle into predictable procedures through institutionalisation and reperformance. Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 139. 30 Allan Kaprow, score for Baggage, 1972, in Allan Kaprow  –​Art as Life, ed. Eva Meyer-​Hermann, Andrew Perchuk and Stephanie Rosenthal (London:  Thames and Hudson and the Getty Research Institute, 2008), 225. 31 Otobong Nkanga, quoted in Hinrich Sachs, ‘Moving  –​Prospects for a Myth of the Modern’, in An Invention of Allan Kaprow for the Moment, ed. Philippe Pirotte (Bern: Kunsthalle Bern, 2007), n.p. 32 Philippe Pirotte, ‘Participation: A Legacy of Allan Kaprow’, in An Invention of Allan Kaprow for the Moment, ed. Pirotte, n.p. 33 Piper, ‘Catalysis’, 77. By the end of The Trainee, Takala ‘had become more or less the freak at the work place’ and ‘did feel genuinely disliked and even bullied. It felt really bad.’ Takala, interview by Opitz, 107. 34 Monika Szewczyk, ‘Exchange and Some Change:  The Imaginative Economies of Otobong Nkanga’, Afterall 37 (Autumn/​Winter 2014): 41–​51 (43).

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Page numbers in bold refer to figures. Acerca (de): ‘Happenings’ (About: ‘Happenings’) 7, 91 Action de 5 femmes (Action by 5 Women) event 204, 206 AFD see Artists for Democracy Agrest, Diana 194 Alberro, Alexander 86 Albright, Thomas 42 alienation 102, 142, 146, 147, 154, 185 Alloway, Lawrence 5, 22n32, 40–1, 120n41 Althusser, Louis 188 Angry Arts Week 54, 75n114, 75n116, 128n93 antipsychiatry 8, 13, 134, 145, 146, 147, 156 antiwar protest 100, 150, 166n12, 174n96 Argentina 7–8, 9, 22n36, 23n41, 81, 81–2, 82–3, 118n24, 208n4 Arte e ideología: CAYC al aire libre (Art and Ideology: CAYC in the Open Air) exhibition 195 cultural conservatism 94 kidnappings 114–15 Lublin installations 191, 192, 193–6, 193, 197, 198 sociology in 91–4, 125n68 art, and revolution 116, 183–4 Arte de los medios de comunicación de masas (Art of the Mass Media) 5, 124n64 Arte de sistemas (Systems Art) exhibition 60, 61, 195–6, 197 Arte e ideología: CAYC al aire libre (Art and Ideology: CAYC in the Open Air) exhibition 195

Artforum magazine 6, 7, 22n34, 31 Artists for Democracy (AFD) 203 Art Systems in Latin America exhibition 60–1 Auslander, Philip 15 Austin, J. L. 71n67 Azoulay, Ariella 46, 73n84 Balsom, Erika 64 Barnes, Mary 146, 171n68 Bateson, Gregory 9–10, 10, 12, 13, 15, 49, 136, 138, 139, 146, 156 Beauvoir, Simone de 205, 206 behaviourism 14–15, 109 Berke, Joseph 142–3, 144–5, 146, 170n39 Bertalanffy, Ludwig von 12, 31, 60 Birdwhistell, Ray L. 11, 51, 74–5n109 Bishop, Claire 21n20, 83, 107 Blanco, Alejandro 92 Blau, Herbert 34 Bloch, Dany 200 bodily autonomy 14–15 Body art 24n42, 180n143, 213n48, 222n131 body, the 226, 139, 141, 156, 159, 162, 204 Bony, Oscar 196 boundaries, permeability of 87, 92, 100 Bourdieu, Pierre 9, 42, 49, 201, 220n112 Bourg, Julian 212n41 breaching technique 228–32, 234 Breakwell, Ian 194 Brown v. Board of Education 35 Buckminster Fuller, R. 98 Buenos Aires 5, 93, 120–1n41

Index see also Centro de Arte y Comunicación; Centro de Artes Visuales; Torcuato Di Tella Institute Burnham, Jack 12, 31–2, 33 ‘Systems Esthetics’ 31, 32, 33 Cage, John 32 Callahan, Michael 129n110 Camnitzer, Luis 93, 94, 195 Carmichael, Stokely 154–5, 175–6n106, 176n112, 176n113 Cassagnac, Jean-Paul 198 CAYC see Centro de Arte y Comunicación CAV see Centro de Artes Visuales Center for Inter-American Relations (CIAR), New York 83, 85, 102, 103, 105, 126n80, 126n81 Centro de Artes Visuales (CAV), Buenos Aires 92, 191, 194 Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC), Buenos Aires 182, 194–6, 198, 207, 216n75, 216n76, 217n91, 220n111 Centro de Investigaciones Sociales (CIS), Buenos Aires 92 childsplay 36 CIAR see Center for Inter-American Relations CIS see Centro de Investigaciones Sociales civil rights movement 14 cocktail parties 87–8, 89–90, 89, 118n26 Cold War 98, 99, 191 collaborative communication 99 Collectif d’art sociologique (Sociological Art Collective) 17, 182, 200–2, 203, 207, 220n111 commodification of the everyday 186 communication 8–9, 10–12, 13, 226, 234–5 in art 14 collaborative 99 and control 138 countercultural models 106–10, 112–16 cross-cultural 83 interpersonal 9–12, 31, 53–4, 97, 146–7 limitations of 151–2 nonverbal 49, 51–3, 51–2 politics of 32 transdisciplinary potential 9–10

communication patterns 133 communication studies 8, 15, 49 communications theory 9 conceptualism 122–3n54 Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation 13, 17, 142–7, 174n97, 175n101, 175n104, 176n112 Round House 147–56, 148, 149, 152, 153, 154 consciousness raising, feminist see feminist consciousness raising contact exercises 138, 145 control 10, 13, 55, 91, 93, 97, 137, 159, 229 and communication 138, 146 and technology 134–5 Cooper, David 13, 194 Coplans, John 49 corporate sponsorship 93, 107, 112 counterculture 12–14, 27n78, 99, 106, 116, 151 Crary, Jonathan 32 cross-cultural communication 83 Cruz, Victor Hernández 38 Cultura: Dentro y fuera del museo (Culture: Inside and Outside the Museum) 196, 198 cultural production 9 Culture in Action exhibition 65 cybernetic networks 149, 152–3 cybernetics 10–12, 14, 26n69, 27n74, 31, 36, 60, 99, 138, 145, 146, 156 Debord, Guy 186 dehumanisation 185 Delmar, Rosalind 164 Delphy, Christine 187 denaturalisation 181, 182–3, 187, 189, 196 DeRoo, Rebecca 186 Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) 142 Dewey, John 38 DIAS see Destruction in Art Symposium displacement, feeling of 147 divided self, the 148 domestic labour 186–7 Downey, Juan 131–2n140 Communication 110, 112 Energy Fields 110, 111 invisible architecture 110

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Index Drucker, Johanna 14 Dumont, Fabienne 206–7 Duras, Marguerite 186 Duvignaud, Jean 200 E.A.T. see Experiments in Art and Technology Electronic Activation Room installation 134, 165n2 Eliet, Françoise 206 English, Darby 232 ephemerality 15, 70n63 EPI see Exploding Plastic Inevitable Erickson, Ruth 201 eroticism 133, 149–50, 179–80n143 ethnography 29n93 Expanded Cinema 174n94 expérience socio-écologique, Une: Photo– film–vidéo (A Socio-Ecological Experience: Photo–Film–Video) exhibition 201 Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) 61–2, 64, 78n147, 78n148, 119n31, 174n92 Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI) 105 Expo ’67, Montreal 94–5, 98, 101, 149 Circuit (Super Heterodyne) 96, 97–100 family, the 172n80, 187 feedback 99, 102, 228 Feldman, Hannah 211n28 feminist consciousness raising Lublin 203–7, 205, 223n138 Schneemann 156–7, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162–5, 162, 163, 176–7n118, 178n129, 179n139 feminist politics 17 feminist theory 156 Femmes/Art 206–7, 224n149 film technology 102 Finkelpearl, Tom 33 Finn-Kelcey, Rose 179n139 Fischer, Hervé 200–1, 222n127 Flusser, Vilém 219–20n110 Fluxus 6, 22n31, 133 Forest, Fred 200–1

Foster, Hal 29n93 From Figuration to Systems Art in Argentina exhibition 195–6 Galison, Peter 11 Galperin, Hernán 94 Gandelsonas, Mario 194 García Canclini, Néstor 93, 121n45, 195 Garfinkel, Harold 229 gay liberation movement 14 gender 156, 186–7, 205, 212n41 gender politics 188–9 gendered divisions 157 general system theory 12, 60, 66n5 geographic diversity 81–2 Germani, Gino 92, 121n45 Giunta, Andrea 82–3 Glueck, Grace 86 Glusberg, Jorge 195, 217n86 Goffman, Erving 14, 33, 64, 77n140, 87, 97, 118n24, 228, 236n25 González, Julieta 131–2n140 Gouldner, Alvin W. 59–60 Grateful Dead 100 Greaney, Patrick 22n36 group dynamics 133, 139 group work 134, 135, 136, 136–9, 141–2, 142, 158–9, 167n17 Group Zero 104 Grunenberg, Christoph 129n107 Gutai group 6 Haacke, Hans 31, 95 hallucinogens 105–6, 129n111, 130n116 Halprin, Anna 139, 140 Halprin, Lawrence 139, 140 Hansen, Al 143 Happenings adaptability 6–7 definition 17 demise 5–6 reassessment of 14–16 relevance 5–8, 225–35 Happening & Fluxus exhibition 16 Haraway, Donna 177n118 Harding, James 143

Index Harold Rivkin Gallery, Washington, DC 110, 112 Harrison, Margaret 164 Harvard Psilocybin Project 105–6 Havana Mural 183, 184 Hayles, N. Katherine 11, 138, 155–6 Heims, Steve Joshua 139 Henderson, David 38 Henry, Jules 36 Hiller, Susan 164, 180n144 Horney, Karen 12 Horowitz, Irving Louis 9 Howard Wise Gallery, New York 103–5 humanism 126n82 Hunt, Kay 164 ICA see Institute of Contemporary Arts ICC see Internationaal Cultureel Centrum Illia, Arturo 91 Illich, Ivan D. 69n43 image, politics of 16 impermanence 109 Information exhibition 95, 125n73 information transmission 36 Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London 146 Institute of Phenomenological Studies 142 interconnectivity 98–9 Internationaal Cultureel Centrum (ICC), Amsterdam 202–3 interpersonal communication 9–12, 31, 53–4, 97, 146–7 interpersonal congruency 153–4, 153, 154 interpersonal relations 137–8, 139, 147, 155, 182–3 Irigaray, Luce 206 Iversen, Margaret 53 Jackson, Shannon 14 Janicot, Françoise 204, 222n134 Japan 6–7 Jefferson Airplane 100 Johnston, Jill 8 Jones, Amelia 15, 176–7n118 Joselit, David 102 Judson Dance Theater 133, 139, 141

Kaprow, Allan 1, 4, 4–5, 5, 6–7, 7, 16, 17, 22n32, 31–66, 81, 119n32, 157, 225, 226 alternative pedagogic projects 34–5 Arte de sistemas (Systems Art) exhibition 195 Assemblage, Environments and Happenings 6, 22n34 Baggage 233–4 Blindsight 79n165 and Children and Communication 61–3, 64, 64 Comfort Zones 64, 79n163 Communication 32–3 and consciousness raising 64, 79n162 Days Off: A Calendar of Happenings 60, 61 Documenta 6 proposal 65 Don’t 76n130 ‘Education of the Un-Artist, The’ 236n16 Event Plan 37–8 Fine! 55, 57, 57, 75–6n126, 76n127, 229 Flick 54, 75n114 Gas 35–6, 36 Giveaway 40, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 51–2, 53 ‘Happenings are Dead – Long Live the Happenings!, The’ 31, 46 Hello 64 How to Make a Happening 18n3 Interruption 54–5, 56 and learning 35–8 ‘Legacy of Jackson Pollock, The’ 21n25 and Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art 65 methodology 32 political resonances 53–5, 56, 57–61, 57, 58, 59, 61 Project Other Ways 33, 33–4, 34, 36, 37, 38, 39, 44, 51, 53–4, 55, 60, 62, 65–6, 72n78, 77n143 ‘Proposal to Bring Professional Artists into the Public Schools, A’ 68n26 Push and Pull 136–7 reformulation of the Happening 37–8 Satisfaction 32 Shape 57–8, 59 Six Ordinary Happenings 38–42, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 52, 55, 57–9, 58, 59, 70n57, 87

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Index Spring Happening 8 Travelog 46–9, 47, 48, 51, 73n87 ‘Use of Art Performance as a Model for Personal and Social Awareness, The’ 15, 64–5 vocabularies of ritual 67n15 Katzenstein, Inés 82, 86 Kedward, Rod 185 Kees, Weldon 49, 52–3 Kelly, Mary 164 kinesics 51 Kinetic Theatre 17, 133, 133–4, 147, 164, 165n1 Kingsley Hall 145–6 Kirby, Michael 4, 6 Kohl, Herbert R. 33–4, 35, 36, 38, 44, 59, 70n55, 77n143 Kostelanetz, Richard 129n110 Kristeva, Julia 206, 223n142 Kuo, Michelle 62 Kustow, Michael 146 Laing, R. D. 13, 145, 146–7, 147–8, 172–3n82, 172n76 Lam, Wifredo 183, 209n15 learning 69n43, 138 and happenings 35–8 Leary, Timothy 12, 13, 27n77, 105–6, 129n111, 145, 171n70 Lebel, Jean-Jacques 81, 181, 207n2 Lee, Pamela M. 12, 134 Lefebvre, Henri 9, 185–6, 203, 211–12n32, 212n35, 212n39 Le Parc, Julio 104–5 Levin, Erica 134 Levine, Les 31 Lifton, John 158 Lippard, Lucy R. 180n143, 195 Longoni, Ana 92, 191 Loving v. Virginia 154 Lublin, Lea 5, 16, 17, 165, 181–207, 225, 226 background 181–2 Dissolution dans l’eau: Pont Marie, 17 heures (Dissolution in Water: Pont Marie, 5pm) 204–6, 205 feminist consciousness raising 203–7, 205, 223n138

Fluvio subtunal installation 193–4, 193, 195–6, 214n63 From Figuration to Systems Art in Argentina exhibition 195–6, 197 Galerie Lahumière exhibition 182 interest in interpersonal relations 182–3 Interrogations sur l’art: Discours sur l’art (Interrogations into Art: Discourse on Art) 198–9, 199, 201–2, 202, 203–4, 221n118 language 185 and May 1968 protests 183–9 Mon fils (My Son) 184, 184, 185, 186, 187–9, 189, 190, 204, 206, 229 paintings 182 Polylogue extérieur 217n93 and sociological art 198–203, 199, 202 Terranautas 191, 192, 194, 214n63 use of the body 181 use of video 198–203, 199, 202, 203–4 Lütticken, Sven 109 McAdam, Doug 60 McLuhan, Marshall 4, 5, 94, 98–9, 105 McMillan, Uri 231–2 McShine, Kynaston 95 Macy Conferences 138, 139 Macy Foundation 10 Maler, Leopoldo 174n96, 214n61 MAMVP see Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris Marcuse, Herbert 13, 109, 116, 131n134, 172n77, 175n101 Martin, Henry 153 Martin, Julie 62 Martin, Tony 84–5 Game Room and ‘Invironment’ 102–5, 104 Marx, Karl 73n92 Marxist materialism 164 Masotta, Oscar 5–6, 7, 16, 92, 122n51, 196 mass media, collectivity through 4 May 1968 protests 181, 183–9, 191, 210–11n26 Mead, Margaret 10 Mead, Taylor 113 media art 21n24

Index media technologies, and social change 62, 64 mental health 145 Messager, Annette 187 Mestman, Mariano 92, 191 Metzger, Gustav 142, 143, 170n58 Michals, Debra 159 Milgram, Stanley 172–3n82, 235–6n14 Millet, Catherine 199 Mills, C. Wright 9, 25n53, 38, 169n50 Minujín, Marta 1, 1–2, 19n12, 81–116, 225, 226 200 Mattresses (The Soft Gallery) 16, 107, 110, 112, 131n136 celluloid subjects 100–6 Circuit (Super Heterodyne) 16, 94–5, 96, 97–100, 106, 107, 109 destrucción, La (The Destruction) 81, 82 Interpenning 107, 108, 109–10, 114, 116 Invasión instantánea (Instantaneous Invasion) 3–4, 93 Kidnappening 107, 113–16, 114, 115 Leyendo las noticias en el Río de la Plata (Reading the News in the River Plata) 169n50 Minucode 16, 83–91, 84, 85, 94, 95, 99, 101–5, 103, 105, 106, 107, 109, 123–4n61 Minuphone 105, 128–9n106 Nicappening 107, 112, 113 Partenón de libros, El (The Parthenon of Books) 89, 117n7 politics 83 psychedelic allusions 106 self-exploitation 112–13 Simultaneidad en simultaneidad (Simultaneity in Simultaneity) 2–5, 3, 7, 16, 20n14, 86, 92–4, 94, 97, 99, 101, 106, 109, 123n56, 124n64, 129n109 and sociability 82, 83–91, 84, 85, 89, 90 Suceso plástico (Plastic Event) 108–9 visionary sociology 106–10, 112–16 miscommunication 146, 172n76 misogyny 143 Mitchell, Juliet 188–9 MNAM see Musée national d’art moderne Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA) 69n50, 95, 107, 108, 114, 115, 130n121

Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris (MAMVP) 17, 183, 184, 189, 190, 198, 210–11n26 Musée national d’art moderne, Paris (MNAM) 210n26 Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires 60, 61 Naslednikov, Mitsou 100 networked relationality 11 Newsweek 88, 89 New Yorker 85, 102 New York Times 8, 83 Nkanga, Otobong, Baggage 233–4, 233 noise, and signal 10–11 nonverbal communication 49, 51–3 Oiticica, Hélio 193 Oldenburg, Claes 6, 133, 165n1 The Store 8 open classroom, the 36–7, 70n55 operationalism 109 Pane, Gina 198, 213n48 Paris 81, 82, 182, 200–1, 204–5, 205 Peace News 151 performance art 8, 14, 15, 71n67, 231, 235 performance documentation 15 Perón, Juan Domingo 91 photography 40–2, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 46–9, 51–3, 73n84 Piaget, Jean 66n5 Pichon-Rivière, Enrique 18n4, 123–4n61 Pickering, Andrew 10 Piene, Otto 104–5 Piper, Adrian, Catalysis series 229–32, 230 Pirotte, Philippe 234 Plotkin, Mariano Ben 92 Pluchart, François 210n26, 213n48, 219n107, 222n131 Podalsky, Laura 93 political engagement 7 political resonances, Kaprow 52–5, 56, 57–61, 57, 58, 59, 61 Pop art 6, 120n35, 122n50 Pope.L 232, 236n24, 236–7n26, 237n29 ATM Piece 232

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Index postcolonial theory 156 Potts, Alex 40 Pouvreau, David 66n5 Primera plana magazine 6, 18n4, 93, 122n50 Project Camelot 99 Psychanalyse et politique (Psychoanalysis and Politics) 207, 224n150 psycho-drama 31 psychosocial communality 142 psychosocial relations 156 Quiles, Daniel R. 104, 106, 126n81 race and racism 44, 46, 154–5, 156, 176n112, 232, 236–7n26 racial politics 44, 46, 72n78, 72n80 Ramírez, Mari Carmen 93, 126n81 Reagan, Ronald 55 Rector, James 55 reflexivity 139 Reich, Wilhelm 139, 168n42, 172n77 relational aesthetics 42, 71n69 reperformance 16, 233–4 Restany, Pierre 32, 88, 118–19n28, 120n41, 194, 199 Revere, Paul 11 revolution, and art 116 Riesman, David 86–8 Rodenbeck, Judith F. 14, 40, 71n69 Rolling Stone magazine 158 Romero Brest, Jorge 92, 116n1, 191, 214n61 Rosenquist, James 98 Ross, Kristin 8–9, 185 Roszak, Theodore 13 Ruesch, Jurgen 9–10, 10, 12, 49, 51–2, 127n91, 136 Ruscha, Ed 51 Twentysix Gasoline Stations 49, 50, 51 Safdie, Moshe 98 Saint Phalle, Niki de 81 Salon de Mai 182, 183–4, 187, 200, 205, 208n7, 209n15 Samaras, Lucas 31 schizophrenia 147

Schneemann, Carolee 5, 6, 16, 88, 127n93, 133–63, 181, 207, 225, 226 antiwar protest 100, 166n12, 174n96 contact exercises 138, 145 Electronic Activation Room 134–5 on the end of the 1960s 177n120 eroticism 133, 149–50, 179–80n143 Eye Body 176–7n118 feminist consciousness raising 156–7, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162–5, 162, 163, 176–7n118, 178n129 Fuses 133, 150, 158 group work 135, 136, 136–9, 141–2, 142, 158–9, 167n17 on the Happening 136 identification as a painter 141–2 Illinois Central 135 Kinetic Theatre 17, 133, 133–4, 147, 164, 165n1 Labyrinth 17, 137–9, 141–2, 142, 148, 159, 165, 167n25, 169n45 letter to Kaprow 165n2 Meat Joy 133 move away from Happenings 164–5 Newspaper Event 17, 139, 141, 141, 142, 148, 159, 169n50 Night Crawlers (Rampants de la nuit) 100, 101, 149 ‘Notes of Motion’ 155 Parts of a Body House Book 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162 Portrait Partials 162, 163, 179n137 and Push and Pull 136–7, 142 Red News 100 Round House 142–7, 144, 147–56, 148, 149, 152, 153, 154, 159, 174n96 Sexual Parameters Survey 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162–4, 178n129 Snows 174n92 technologies of 134–5 Thames Crawling 136, 158–9 transformation of the Happening 136–9, 141–2 Viet-Flakes 100, 149, 150, 150, 158 schools, segregation 35 sensory connection 137–8 Shaked, Nizan 229

Index Shannon, Claude 11, 26n65 Sharp, Willoughby 194 Shunk-Kender 81 signal, and noise 10–11 Situationists 186 Skinner, B. F. 14–15 Sobre Happenings (On Happenings) 7 sociability 16, 82, 83–91, 84, 85, 89, 90 Sociability Project 86–7, 89–90 social change, and media technologies 62, 64 social control 91 Social Deviants 149 social environment 83 socialisation 86–8, 106, 188–9, 234–5 socialising, sociology of 83–91, 84, 85, 89, 90 sociocultural context 46 sociological art 198–203, 199, 202, 203, 219n108, 222n127, 222n131 sociological imagination 25n53 sociological methods 95 sociology 9, 13, 14–15, 33, 59–60 in Argentina 91–4, 125n68 of socialising 83–91, 84, 85, 89, 90 visionary 106–10, 112–16 soft power 112 Solomon, Alan 5 Sontag, Susan 8, 119n33 spectacle 109 speech acts 71n67 stigma 97 Sullivan, Harry Stack 9, 12 synaesthetic cinema 149–50 synchronicity 18n2 systems art 31 ‘Systems Esthetics’ 31, 32, 33 system theory 27n74, 31, 60 Szeemann, Harald 16, 133 Szewczyk, Monika 234 Takala, Pilvi Real Snow White 226–7, 227, 232 Trainee, The 227, 228 Tan, Elisa 203, 223n135 technology, and control 134–5 Telstar 18n2

Tenney, James 100, 137 Thénot, Jean-Paul 200–1 therapeutic nonconformism 146 Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth 169n45 Tickner, Lisa 98 Tinguely, Jean 81 Torcuato Di Tella Institute (Instituto Torcuato Di Tella), Buenos Aires 2–3, 83, 91–2, 94, 120n39, 191, 194 Torey, Claude 204 Touraine, Alain 203 Traba, Marta 7, 120n35 transnational exchange 7, 16 Turner, Fred 99 UBA see University of Buenos Aires Ukeles, Mierle Laderman 187, 188 United States of America 8–9 University of Buenos Aires (UBA) 92 Ursprung, Philip 14 Us Company or Company of Us (USCO) 105 Verbitsky, Bernardo 123n55 Verón, Eliseo 7, 92, 93, 196 Vicario, Niko 20n14 Vietnam War 100, 166n12, 174n96 violence 55 visual culture 105 Vostell, Wolf 4, 18n1 Three Country Happening 1–2, 2, 4 Wadia, Khursheed 186 Waldman, Max 134, 135 Warhol, Andy 98, 113 Weber, Stephanie 187 White, Kenneth 134, 165n2 Whitman, Robert 61–2 Wiener, Norbert 5, 10, 10–11, 36, 138, 168n35 Wilke, Hannah 218n100 Willats, Stephen 201 women’s liberation movement 14 Yalter, Nil 204 Yinger, J. Milton 13 Youngblood, Gene 64, 149–50

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