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 This archive and Kaprow's personal library in Encinitas, California have provided substantial previously unpublished evidence of his early interest in the American pragmatist John Dewey, and reveal many of the motivations for Kaprow's emphasis on change, together with his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.

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In this study I outline seven characteristics of a traditional Happening (the use of games and play, an inherent intertextual element, an emphasis on place/space, an element/spirit of anarchy, an element of chance, an emphasis on the fusion of art with everyday life, and the existence of both a purpose and a meaning) and seek to determine which characteristics contribute to the Happening's current usage as a rhetorical tool. I created a traditional Happening containing a message of environmental consumption and destruction, and surveyed audience members regarding their interpretation and experience. The survey responses were coded using a top-down narrative analysis. I discovered that intertextuality, place/space, and the fusion of art with everyday life are particularly effective communicators of a message in a socially or politically conscious Happening.

Thesis--Cologne. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 274-297).

Si c’est le futurisme et le Dadaïsme qui sont mis de l’avant dans la plupart des publications sur l’histoire de ce que l’on nomme la performance, l’impact du surréalisme est encore et toujours laissé de côté. En nous appuyant sur les recherches de Roselee Goldberg et Adrian Henri, il s’agit de mettre en lumière la contribution des surréalistes à l’art dit de performance. Précisément, nous reconstruisons et analysons les évènements éphémères que les surréalistes organisent dans la foulée de l’inauguration de leurs grandes expositions internationales : l’Acte manqué mis en scène pour l’Exposition internationale du surréalisme (1938), Prière de toucher, l’objet performatif réalisé pour Le Surréalisme en 1947, puis Festin inaugural et l’Exécution du testament du Marquis de Sade, tous deux planifiés pour l’Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme (E.R.O.S.) en 1959. Après l’étude détaillée de ces évènements, il s’agit de les mettre en parallèle avec les expérimentations des artistes se vouant à l’art de la performance des années 1960/1970. Sans affirmer que ce genre d’œuvres est surréaliste, l’objectif est de montrer que certains enjeux et questions auxquelles le groupe s’intéresse se trouvent reflétés dans l’époque de l’âge d’or de la performance. / Although Futurism and Dadaism are credited for their experiences with different forms of performance, only few art historians acknowledge Surrealism’s influence. Building on the work of RoseLee Goldberg and Adrian Henri, the purpose of this thesis is to shed light on Surrealism’s contribution to what is globally known as Performance Art. We reconstruct, study and analyze the ephemeral events organized by the surrealists for their international exhibitions that took place in Paris: the Acte manqué presented at the opening of the Exposition internationale du surréalisme (1938), Prière de toucher, a performative object created for Le Surréalisme en 1947, and Festin inaugural as well as the Exécution du testament du Marquis de Sade, both organized for the Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme (E.R.O.S.) in 1959. After a detailed analysis of these events, we then discuss their possible links to Performance Art of the 1960s/1970s. Our aim is not to state that the experimentations of that time period are inherently surrealist, but – in order to show the importance of the surrealist ephemeral events – , we point out that some issues and questions that posed the French avant-garde group, images even, were mirrored in Performance Art of the 1960s/ 1970s.

This thesis is concerned with extending the role that live performance might play in our understanding of the work of the interrelated avant-garde performance communities that emerged in New York in the 1960s and early 1970s. This is a practice-led project that uses my own performance work as the site of its enquiry. In the last decade performance itself has begun to play a significant role in our understanding of and relationship to past performances, in the main through the increasing pervasion of re-enactment as an acknowledged historiographical trope. However, as a consequence of its association with re-enactment, the nature of the historiographical role afforded to performance is still primarily determined by its proximity to the archive and institutionalised modes of performance history. Challenging the primacy of the re-enactment as a means of embodied engagement with past performance, this research project explores how manipulation of my own performance practice might generate new forms of historical knowledge. In particular my focus is on using this practice to develop a new understanding of how the work of this earlier period altered y the experience of the urban landscape for those participating in the work, audience and performers alike. Structured around a rigorous analysis of three specific works from across this earlier period, I conceived a series of spatial ‘blueprints’ that were applied to my practice to create three new performance pieces. Using my own research and practice to renegotiate the relationship between live performance and the archive, I demonstrate the possibility for a new historiographical approach to past performance. This approach emphasises the role of the participants in the performance as generators of an alternative form of historical understanding embedded in ways of operating in the city.

El tema de esta tesis aborda el estudio de las influencias plásticas y literarias de Bruno Schulz y Stanislav Witkiewicz en el teatro de Tadeusz Kantor, específicamente utilizando la obra Wielopole Wielopole como ejemplo de estas. Se concluye en la imagen de Kantor como paradigma de creador escénico en tanto que repotencia las influencias para crear un lenguaje propio y autónomo. Los puntos que se analizarán son el abordaje del happening como medio de creación de la obra teatral, el lenguaje que propone Kantor a partir de la pintura y su búsqueda por la creación de objetos y personajes autónomos; la Teoría de la Forma Pura que plantea Witkiewicz para la desvinculación del naturalismo en las obras plásticas y dramáticas junto con su carga metafísica y la mitificación de la infancia que propone Schulz, por medio de sus cuentos, como herramienta creadora. Varios de los estudios sobre el director han sido abordados desde campos de la semiótica, filosofía y filología, por lo que esta investigación se ubica desde una nueva perspectiva para mostrar un análisis a partir de la postura de una actriz formada. Así es que esta investigación resulta ser una reflexión sobre la creación de un lenguaje en particular, en tanto que es un ejemplo para los jóvenes artistas responsables del crecimiento del campo teatral limeño en la actualidad.

The diploma thesis deals with the construction of a new community centre and reconstruction of an existing church and a parish in Ostrava-Kunčičky. The aim of the thesis is to revitalize the area of the potential centre of happenings in Kunčičky and to respond appropriately to the context and character of the place. The design works with objects equally and creates a solid image of the spiritual and community centre. The building complex helps to activate the site itself and its surroundings and brings a new impulse to community life in the area. Community centre and interventions in the existing buildings efficiently and adequately use the parcel. The design strives to use the potential of the place and works with hidden links to the surroundings. The resulting solution is characterized by its multilayer nature. Partial fragments help to create a complex unit with a number of new outdoor areas of different character, scale and utilization. Two-storey compact structure of the community centre includes social and leisure time facilities. The chosen technology of the building is in accordance with the specific social structure in the area and the operational and economy aspect alongside. The main goal in the reconstruction of the church buildings and parish is to build up on their values, uplift qualities and to purify them from inappropriate elements.

This thesis examines works of theatre and film that explore a refusal of acting. Acting has traditionally been considered as something false or as pretending, in opposition to everyday life, which has been considered as something real and truthful. This has resulted in a desire to refuse acting, evident in the tradition of the anti-theatrical prejudice where acting is considered to be seductive and dangerous. All the works that I examine in this thesis are relatively recent and all of them explore the paradox that in our (postmodern) times a gradual reversal has occurred where everyday life is seen as more and more false or as pretending or simulating (ie. containing acting and theatricality) and conversely, acting in theatre and film has become the place where people have begun searching for reality and truth and where ‘acting’ and pretending in life can be revealed and refused. The result of this paradox - and what I also discuss as a confusion of acting and living - is that the place in which acting can be refused has shifted; the ethical desire to refuse acting (in theatre and in life) is turning up in the aesthetic domain of acting itself. In my first chapter I study works by filmmaker István Szabó and playwright Werner Fritsch, who represent the desire to refuse acting in the context of fascism where theatrical and filmic spectacle was used by the Nazis to seduce the population and where actors during this period also experienced an inability to separate their political and artistic lives. In my second chapter I look at the way Genet’s The Balcony and Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution explore the desire to refuse acting as a result of a confusion of acting and living in the context of sexual (sadomasochistic) role-play. And in my third chapter I examine the way Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls, von Trier’s The Idiots and Affleck’s I’m Still Here represent a refusal of acting and theatricality altogether, responding to the way that ‘acting’ in life may have become an all-pervasive substitute (a simulation) for living. Foundational to the development of this thesis and a major source of material is my analysis of three theatrical productions with Free Theatre Christchurch, directed by Peter Falkenberg, in which I was involved as an actor and in which a refusal of acting was explored.