‘I AM NOT ALLAN KAPROW (but I could be confused for him at a distance.)’

Or,
‘Why reinvent the wheel?’ an argument in favor of doing it again
Or,
‘A Few Thoughts on my ‘FLUIDS’ (Allan Kaprow, 1967) reinvention for the Performa>07 biennial at Cooper Union.’



By way of introduction I was approached by the Performa>07 biennial and asked if I was interested in doing an Allan Kaprow piece in conjunction with a number of other Kaprow related events they were sponsoring (18 Happenings in 6 Parts, Push and Pull). After some research and reflection I proposed doing ‘FLUIDS’ with a group of Cooper Union students.

After deciding to do ‘FLUIDS’ and setting in motion the various agencies required to realize it, the Kaprow estate contacted us with the language we were to use: it was to be a ‘reinvention’. Once invented, twice . . .. ‘reinvented’? With its emphasis on an initial historical moment it deepened an already vexing question about doing a performance/happening/event that has already occurred – where on the spectrum of participation and authorship does a ‘reinvention’ lie? If I tried to imagine the line of authorship with, on the one hand, the most traditional form of copying – the easel painters in the Metropolitan of Art or a cover band - with their concern for making an exact replica and on the other end of that line the appropriation or ‘revisitation’ artist (how to describe Marina Abramovic’s ‘7 easy pieces’?) – where an original piece is made subservient to a new set of artistic demands – I wondered where would ‘FLUIDS’ lie. Worried that both Performa>07 and the Kaprow estate wanted a replica of the piece, and knowing that I would never be able to provide it, I was reminded of what Steve Martin said about translation: that it was like a bad marriage. First it’s about contrived fidelity, then it’s about concealed transgressions, finally – it’s about survival.


While I was parsing this dilemma, I attended a panel discussion with Stephanie Rosenthal, Irving Sandler and the artist Paul McCarthy on Kaprow’s work. The issue of this new practice of revisiting Kaprow’s work came up as Stephanie Rosenthal had just curated a major show of his work at the Haus der Kunst in Munich - and had ‘reinvented’ a number of his events/happenings. The conversation revolved in part around his last instructions (he passed away last year) regarding doing his happenings anew. His instructions were: ‘look at the documentation, reinvent the piece’. This was, in essence what I had done anyway – poured over Jeff Kelly’s book ‘Childs play’ with its black and white photos and first hand accounts – and invented the piece.


While those directives give license to a performer in the same way a score would, they also raise the danger that the original documentation becomes too fixed a point of reference. I had project managed Performa>07’s presentation of ’18 Happening in 6 Parts’, where a stage designer had been hired to rebuild the original 1959 loft space the event had happened in– from the original photos (1,000 square feet of mdf had a variable flooring pattern ripped into it on a table saw to replicate the original floors in the documentation). It’s a short step from there to making costumes from the 50’s and 60’s and rehearsing period accents. The result would be a contrived fidelity – a forced verisimilitude. It would be equivalent to a word-to-word computer translation that literalizes and flattens the language, losing syntax and meaning along the way.


In the end it was the students and the internal logic of the piece that brought it to life. Unlike a theatrical event where parts are memorized, or a FLUXUS score where a chart is given for a series of actions, FLUIDS is a task, like a bucket brigade or barn raising. We had 24,000lbs of ice and were going to build a rectangular enclosure. There was no script or directions, no manual for the right or wrong way to do it (beyond its size of 30 feet long x 10 feet wide x 8 feet tall), and the possibility of it failing or being hopelessly compromised – as with any task- was present.

The students took to it with enthusiasm, a crowd gathered to watch, passers-by asked what it was and strangers explained, contingent meanings flowed towards it (a crane was erected across the street, the workers came to admire our work as we had admired theirs), men in the park jeered the students, Allan Kaprow’s widow stopped by as did my girlfriend and daughter, the students all ate pizza together - and, in the middle of this activity I knew that the intelligence of the piece could only arise out of doing it, and that reinvention was, after all, the appropriate term–we were the first, doing it again.

By early afternoon we were on the outside of a space that we could no longer see inside of. When the students laid the last row of ice blocks at 8’, they closed in an empty space. While we knew there was ‘nothing’ there, as it were, (and I had seen that ‘nothing’ dozens of times in the documentation from 1967) it was a nothing that invited contemplation. It occurred to me that that interior space, unseeable and inexplicable, perfectly mirrored the ‘nothing’ that went into it’s making. Both were at once the purpose of the piece and perfectly invisible. In response to a question about when the ‘performance’ would start I overheard one of my students say, ‘this is it.’ You couldn’t really see it, but we were doing it.

Then it melted.