Allan Kaprow and the Glitter of Machines

As one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, Allan Kaprow experimented with the concept of art and interaction. Strongly opposed to the traditional museum viewer of art, Kaprow developed the idea of the Happening. Kaprow says of this term (which he coined in the late 1950s), " What is a Happening? A game, an adventure, a number of activities engaged in my participants for the sake of playing." The idea behind his art was to involve the audience to the point of making them active participants with the art. His mantra, "art as life", simplifies this for us. Kaprow believed there should be no lines between what we live and what we create because everything we do is a creative act.

In 1968, with the growing availability of video equipment, Kaprow began his own ventures into this new frontier. While acting as an assistant dean at the California Institute for the Arts, Kaprow encouraged his students to explore the medium of video extensively, despite his own reservations. Kaprow published an essay voicing his own opinion of this "new" medium. Here are two quotes from his essay entitled Video Art: Old Wine, New Bottle:

"Intriguing as they are, they are also discouraging... the constant reliance on the glitter of the machines to carry the fantasy-- strike me as simple-minded and sentimental.

...

The use of Television as an art medium is generally considered experimental... [S]o far, in my opinion, it is only marginally experimental. The hardware is new, to art at least, but the conceptual framework and aesthetic attitudes around most video as an art are quite tame."

Jam, by Allan Kaprow, involved students licking jam off an old car. Interactive indeed.

Kaprow found that what many artists were producing were very theatrical, especially in the sense that they were recorded events to be viewed at a later date. This was all too cinematic, so he developed a proclivity for closed-circuit installations. This way the viewer became an immediate actor in the piece by seeing their face on a screen or using phones to contact other on-camera locations in real time.

Although he remained fairly critical and disillusioned with the idea of video as a medium, Allan Kaprow's commentary may very well have pushed the video artists of the time to expand their ideas of what this new tool could create.