Allan Kaprow–Art as Life

The large-scale retrospective, Allan Kaprow–Art as Life, presents over five decades of work by the renowned postwar American artist and teacher Allan Kaprow (1927–2006). The exhibition traces the development of the artist’s oeuvre from works that incorporated everyday objects into collages and assemblages to all-encompassing Environments. The installation consists of paintings, drawings, sculptures, and assemblages, along with photographs, films, videos, and activity booklets. In addition, exclusive to MOCA’s presentation, the exhibition features a selection of early Environments reinterpreted by artists John Baldessari and Skylar Haskard, Allen Ruppersberg, and Barbara T. Smith; projects by artists Paul McCarthy and Suzanne Lacy with Peter Kirby and Michael Rotundi; as well as specially commissioned reinventions of over 22 Happenings by local institutions throughout Southern California.

Happenings, a term coined by Allan Kaprow in the late 1950s, define an art form in which an action is extracted from the environment, replacing the traditional art object with a performative gesture rooted in the movements of everyday life. In consultation with Kaprow’s longtime friend and artist Paul McCarthy, MOCA invited Los Angeles–area universities, museums, artist-run spaces, and the City of Los Angeles to reinvent a diverse selection of Kaprow’s Happenings.

To facilitate this portion of the exhibition, moca.org/kaprow provides a comprehensive calendar of these Happenings. Utilizing the blog format, the web site also acts as an exhibition archive—where venues and participants have the opportunity to provide documentation of their Happenings—as well as a venue for community dialogue, building upon the dynamic relationship between interaction and interpretation embodied in Kaprow’s work.

Organized by The Haus der Kunst München in cooperation with the Van Abbemuseum, the curatorial concept for Allan Kaprow–Art as Life was developed in close collaboration with the recently deceased artist, and curators Stephanie Rosenthal and Eva Meyer-Hermann. MOCA’s presentation is organized by MOCA Curator Philipp Kaiser and MOCA Chief Curator Paul Schimmel with Assistant Director for Contemporary Programs and Research at the Getty Research Institute Andrew Perchuk.

Please note: the Happenings listed on this site are FREE unless otherwise noted. Please consult the schedule to see which institutions invite audience participation, spectators only, or are closed to the public (but can be viewed on line at moca.org/kaprow). In all cases, interested participants or spectators are encouraged to contact the organizing institutions for more detailed information or questions about the events.