Skip to main content
University of California Press

Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life

by Allan Kaprow (Author), Jeff Kelley (Editor)
Paperback eBook
Price: $49.95 / £42.00
Publication Date: Nov 2023
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 297
ISBN: 9780520930841
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Read an Excerpt(opens in new window)
Recommend to your Library (PDF)(opens in new window)Rights and Permissions

About the Book

Allan Kaprow's "happenings" and "environments" were the precursors to contemporary performance art, and his essays are some of the most thoughtful, provocative, and influential of his generation. His sustained inquiry into the paradoxical relationship of art to life and into the nature of meaning itself is brought into focus in this newly expanded collection of his most significant writings. A new preface and two new additional essays published in the 1990s bring this valuable collection up to date.


Allan Kaprow's "happenings" and "environments" were the precursors to contemporary performance art, and his essays are some of the most thoughtful, provocative, and influential of his generation. His sustained inquiry into the paradoxical relationship of

About the Author

Allan Kaprow (1927-2006) was Professor Emeritus of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. Jeff Kelley is a critic and teacher.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Preface to the Expanded Edition: On the Way to Un-Art

THE FIFTIES
The Legacy of Jackson Pollock (1958)
Notes on the Creation of a Total Art (1958)

THE SIXTIES
Happenings in the New York Scene (1961)
Impurity (1963)
The Artist as a Man of the World (1964)
The Happenings Are Dead:
Long Live the Happenings! (1966)
Experimental Art (1966)
Manifesto (1966)
Pinpointing Happenings (1967)
The Shape of the Art Environment (1968)

THE SEVENTIES
The Education of the Un-Artist, Part I (1971)
The Education of the Un-Artist, Part II (1972)
Doctor MD (1973)
The Education of the Un-Artist, Part III (1974)
Video Art: Old Wine, New Bottle (1974)
Formalism: Flogging a Dead Horse (1974)
Nontheatrical Performance (1976)
Participation Performance (1977)
Performing Life (1979)

THE EIGHTIES
The Real Experiment (1983)
Art Which Can't Be Art (1986)
Right Living (1987)

THE NINETIES
The Meaning of Life (1990)
Maestro Maciunas (1996)
Just Doing (1997)

Selected Bibliography of Allan Kaprow's Writings on Art
Index 257

Reviews

"Throughout these essays there is a lyric impulse, a rising of the heart, a moral passion that represents the spirit of the 60s at its best. At the same time Kaprow's thinking is exceedingly rigorous. . . . He has the optimism of the period without its willed naïveté."
— Art in America
"Known as the father of Happenings and Performance Art, Allan Kaprow is also a sagacious teacher, a historian, a storyteller, and, as demonstrated in this volume, one of the most perceptive and articulate cultural critics of this era. Art for Kaprow is not mere formal structure but a participatory and interactive experience of life."—Peter Selz, Coeditor of Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings (California, 1996) and author of Nathan Oliveria (California, 2002)

"Allan Kaprow's essays sound fresh and new…. Artists of the world, read this--you have nothing to lose but your equilibrium."—Lucy R. Lippard, author of Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America