Allan Kaprow, born in New Jersey in 1927, was an important figure in the fluxus movement of the 1960s. He was inspired by John Cage and Jackson Pollock. He coined the term “happenings” which was used to describe a series of multi-media artworks on display in a single location. A happening was any staged art event that required active participation from an audience to complete the work of art which revolutionized the practice of performance art. Kaprow started out his career as a painter but by the mid 1950s he became interested in the shifting concepts of space as subjectively experienced by the viewer. Allan emerged out of the group of artists known as the Rutgers Group, based out of Rutgers University where he taught art history and studio art. Kaprow rejected abstract expressionism and instead focused on an intellectual and theorized view of art. He used the “action” way of painting in Abstract Expressionism to create performance art.
All of this changed the definition of the art object. Now art could be anything including movement, sound and even scent. Kaprow’s pieces involved spaces that he physically altered with deliberate sights and sounds.
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