Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison. / Typescript. Title from title screen (viewed Aug. 5, 2009). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 196-197).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 196-197).

This thesis addresses critically the work of American artist Allan Kaprow (1927-2006), focusing especially on the tensions Kaprow proposed between 'art' and 'life'. It presents a reconsideration of the most fertile period in Kaprow's career, from his undergraduate studies in the late 1940s to his mature work of the 1970s, prior to the increasing demands made on him to produce re-enactments of his early work. The period 1948-1976 presents a fuller overview of the themes and motivations of his practice than has been scrutinised in the existing literature. The research is based on extensive examination of the Allan Kaprow Papers at the Getty Institute, Los Angeles, which revealed significant and previously unstudied documentation and images. This archive and Kaprow's personal library in Encinitas, California have provided substantial previously unpublished evidence of his early interest in the American pragmatist John Dewey, and reveal many of the motivations for Kaprow's emphasis on change, together with his relational approach to form, context and process. The role of composer John Cage in the development of Kaprow's thoughts on chance helps elucidate the complexities inherent in the development of Kaprow's negotiation between chance and control. The present study also gives, for the first time, a comparative and detailed reading of the five drafts of Kaprow's Assemblage, Environments and Happenings (1966), a reading which sheds fresh light on his art and publications of the period. The thesis also presents a thorough reconsideration of the significance of play in Kaprow's work of the late 1960s and 1970s, including the tensions between and among play, work, hierarchy and liberation. Kaprow's many struggles to conceptualise and reconcile these tensions, and others, such as between audience and participant, private and public and narrative and history, were a necessary feature of the categories of art and artistic identity, including 'Happening', 'Activity' and 'Un-artist' that he helped bring into being.

• What insights can art reveal in the context of organizational change? • How do artistic practices influence the way communities address change? • In what ways can an individual artistic practice concerned with the role of art in society add new insights to theories and practices of contemporary art? These questions are approached through three interrelated methods. In the first the artist as researcher consciously addresses organizational change through her artistic practice, over a three year period, within the different communities of Woodend Barn, a volunteer-led arts centre in the North East of Scotland. The second method is a literature review focusing on the selected artistic practices of Allan Kaprow, Suzanne Lacy and Artist Placement Group. Each practice is discussed in relation to the underpinning philosophical principals of Pragmatism, in particular John Dewey’s ideas on the generative qualities of aesthetic experience. These insights inform the research as it unfolds within the organizational context of Woodend Barn, itself at a point of significant change. The third method draws on anthropologist Michel de Certeau’s theory of the act of speaking to define the details of social interaction. This leads to a conversational method of analysis that draws out the synergies and differences of the chairperson of Woodend Barn and the artist. The analysis aims to understand the qualities and conditions for social interaction in arts practice and how they affect change in organizational contexts. It has become apparent that a key condition of the artwork is an artist who is committed to a refined and informed understanding of the social dynamics of art (as evidenced in the two principal projects Fold (2012) and Lavender (2012-2014)). It is important to recognize that not all artists have these skills or are interested in adopting a social focus in their practice. The research sets out to address and influence new generations of artists and more broadly, to rethink the value of social interaction in artists practices in relation to economic values. Understanding how social interactions become generative sense-making experiences is an important quality of the practice and research findings. This resonates with Dewey’s theory that it is through the unconstrained characteristics of art that aesthetic experience can shift deeply- rooted ways of thinking. The research concludes with a social manifesto for art that outlines the conditions for individuals from different communities to act in ways that are self-directed and lead to community resilience.

This thesis argues that presence in the performing arts can be reconceived, via the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, as an encounter with difference or ‘differential presence’ which is variously defined as immanence, destratification, affect/becoming, and duration. These definitions are developed through a series of four analyses of exemplary performance practices: 1) The Living Theatre; 2) Antonin Artaud; 3) Allan Kaprow and 4) Goat Island. Chapter One recuperates the Living Theatre from a dominant narrative of ‘failure’, aided by the Deleuzian concepts of ontological participation, immanence, production/creation and ‘the people to come’. Reframing the company as pioneers of methods such as audience participation and collective creation, the chapter argues that their theatrical ambition is irreducible to some simple pursuit of undifferentiated presence (as authenticity or communion). Chapter Two provides an exposition of three key concepts emerging in the encounter between Artaud and Deleuze: the body without organs, the theatre without organs, and the destratified voice. The chapter proposes that To have done with the judgment of god constitutes an instance of a theatre without organs that uses the destratified voice in a pursuit of differential presence – as a nonrepresentative encounter with difference that forces new thoughts upon us. Chapter Three defines differential presence in relation to Deleuze’s concepts of affect and becoming-imperceptible and Kaprow’s concepts of ‘experienced insight’, nonart, ‘becoming “the whole”’, and attention. The chapter argues that Kaprow and Deleuze share a concern to theorize the practice of participating in actuality beyond the subject/object distinction, in a manner that promotes an ethico-political sense of taking part in “the whole”. Finally, Chapter Four focuses on the temporal aspect of differential presence, arguing that through slowness, waiting, repetition and imitation, Goat Island’s performance work acknowledges and responds to ‘the need to open ourselves affectively to the actuality of others’ (Mullarkey 2003: 488).

In den vergangenen Jahren widmete sich eine stetig steigende Anzahl von Ausstellungen und Reenactments der Vergegenwärtigung und Re-Vision der Geschichte von Performance-Kunst und integrierte Aufführungen in diesen Kontext. Sie sind beweglicher Umgang mit den Performance-Archiven. Sie aktualisieren die Frage nach dem Charakter der Artefakte, auf die sich alte und neue Erzählungen zu und über Geschichte(n) der Performance beziehen und thematisieren ihre Lesbarkeit in je neuen Zusammenhängen. Wie in der Bewegungsspur, die den Zuschauern angeboten wird, Zugänge eröffnet werden, wird anhand von Ausstellungsbeispielen untersucht.

In den vergangenen Jahren widmete sich eine stetig steigende Anzahl von Ausstellungen und Reenactments der Vergegenwärtigung und Re-Vision der Geschichte von Performance-Kunst und integrierte Aufführungen in diesen Kontext. Sie sind beweglicher Umgang mit den Performance-Archiven. Sie aktualisieren die Frage nach dem Charakter der Artefakte, auf die sich alte und neue Erzählungen zu und über Geschichte(n) der Performance beziehen und thematisieren ihre Lesbarkeit in je neuen Zusammenhängen. Wie in der Bewegungsspur, die den Zuschauern angeboten wird, Zugänge eröffnet werden, wird anhand von Ausstellungsbeispielen untersucht.

À l’orée des années soixante, la performance a cherché à imposer un art de l’action éphémère que n’entraverait aucun type de médiation, qu’il soit symbolique (la distance acteur/spectateur), technique (les médias), ou même linguistique (le langage, les signes). Enjeu de nombreux débats entre les années 1960 et 1990, ces tentatives ont trouvé de multiples formulations théoriques s’appuyant sur les outils du poststructuralisme en particulier, mais aussi sur des cadres de pensée différents, directement hérités du modernisme de Greenberg. On explore ici les étapes et enjeux de ce croisement, jusqu’à la rupture apportée dans les années 1990 et 2000 où les débats théoriques, toujours dirigés par des schémas poststructuralistes, redonnèrent une place centrale aux médiations, tout particulièrement au document. Or, la figure importante de la pratique artistique qu’est devenu le document depuis les années soixante s’avère mettre en question l’ontologie traditionnelle de la performance, orientée sur l’événement, autant que son épistémologie, qui valorise l’expérience directe. La prise en compte des dimensions instrumentales et artistiques du document nous conduit à réviser la poïétique traditionnelle de la performance et les théories de la communication qui lui sont liées, et à repenser par là même l’opposition entre objet et événement qui fonde la définition de la performance. C’est ainsi qu’on interroge le rapport de celle-ci à l’inscription, pour la redéfinir comme un art irréductible à son contexte d’exécution et travaillé en profondeur par la reproduction et la représentation, au travers notamment de l’étude de certaines figures exemplaires, Allan Kaprow, Chris Burden ou Tino Sehgal. / On the edge of the 1960’s, performance looked after imposing an art of ephemeral action that no kind of mediation would impede, be it symbolic (the distance between actor and spectator), technical (the medias), or even linguistical (language, signs). Those attempts led to numerous discussions between the 1960’s and the 1990’s, and have found numerous theoretical formulations using particularly the tools of poststructuralism, but also frames of thought directly inherited from Greenberg modernism. We explore here the stages and issues of this cross-over until the break of the 1990’s and 2000’s where the theoretical debates, always using poststructuralist schemes, gave a central role to mediations, particularly to the document. Documents have become an important figure of artistic practice since the 1960’s and turned out to question the traditional ontology of performance, based on the event, as well as its epistemology that promotes live experience. We try to consider the instrumental and artistic dimensions of the document ; this leads us to revise the traditional poetics of performance and theories of communication that are related to it, and to consider anew the opposition between object and event on which the definition of performance is based. Thus, we question the links between performance and inscription, redefined as an art that is irreducible to its context of execution and worked in depth by reproduction and representation, through the study of certain figureheads : Allan Kaprow, Chris Burden or Tino Sehgal.

L'art comme jeu n'est pas une simple métaphore. Il correspond à la forme que prennent de nombreuses œuvres d'art notamment les maquettes et miniatures contemporaines et aujourd'hui le jeu est représenté ou mis en scène dans de nombreuses expositions. Cependant l'artiste n'est pas un joueur comme les autres mais un joueur professionnel qui s'oppose à la figure du non-artiste ou de l'artiste amateur défendue par les artistes des avant-gardes qui avaient élevé le jeu au rang d'art. Alors que la consommation de l'art prend la forme d'un divertissement à grande échelle et que l'on assiste à une Disneylandisation des musées, l'art contemporain comme jeu ne semble plus aussi subversif que celui des années soixante. Pourtant l'art comme jeu en tant que modèle et outil de changement social perdure. C'est un art d'attitude, héritier des dernières avant-gardes, se tenant en dehors des frontières habituelles de l'art et réalisant le dépassement souhaité par les situationnistes ou Allan Kaprow. / Art as play is not only a metaphor. It is the particular form of many works of art, especially contemporary models and miniatures. Play itself is nowadays represented or staged in numerous exhibitions. However, the artist is not a player like any other but a professional player in contrast to the figure of the non-artist or amateur artist defended by avant-garde artists who had raised play to the level of art. While the consumption of art takes the form of large-scale entertainment and we witness a Disneylandisation of museums, contemporary art as play no longer seems as subversive as it did in the sixties. Yet art as play as model and tool for social change endures. It is an art of attitude, heir to the last avant-gardes, standing outside the usual boundaries of art and an art that achieves the desired by Allan Kaprow and the Situationists.

Die vorliegende Arbeit erörtert das Phänomen „Verhüllung als Kunst“ anhand von Kunstwerken von Man Ray, Maurice Henry, Allan Kaprow, Joseph Beuys, Bruce Nauman, Franz Erhard Walther, Antoni Tapies, Joseph Kosuth und Christo und Jeanne-Claude. Diese exemplarische Auswahl macht den Einfluss künstlerischer Strömungen und Zielsetzungen deutlich und zeigt zugleich die verschiedenen Funktionen von Verhüllungen als Kunst. Aufgrund der immer wiederkehrenden „Ähnlichkeitsvermutungen“ zwischen bekannten sakralen und profanen Verhüllungen und sog. Verhüllungskunstwerken in (populär-) wissenschaftlichen Veröffentlichungen, wird eine genaue Betrachtung profaner und sakraler Verhüllungen vorgenommen. Ebenso geht die Arbeit der Frage nach, inwieweit die Verwendung der Begriffe „verhüllen“ und „verpacken“ sowohl bei der Interpretation als auch in den Titeln der Kunstwerke von Bedeutung sind. Fragen nach dem Verhüllten, der Hülle und ihrem Material, dem Ort, der Dauer, der Dimension und der Art und Weise der Verhüllung offenbaren eine Fülle von Erscheinungsformen und Merkmalen derselbigen. Die Analyse wird in der Interpretation durch (auto-)biografisches Material und frühere Interpretationen ergänzt.