Half-Inch Portable
Video
Portable units including a half-inch tape deck and a
black-and-white video camera were commercialized in Japan
at the beginning of the 1970s. Until then, video
equipment, which used two-inch tape, notably in the
television studios, was heavy, hard to handle, and
expensive. By contrast, portable video offered the
possibility of easily recorded images and instant
playback. As such, it appeared to offer an alternative to
the hegemony of television, and in France, political
community activists were quick to make use of it.Happening (event,
performance, action)
The happening is an evolving action carried out
within a defined environment. Notwithstanding a general
direction established in advance, there remains a large
margin for improvisation while it is in progress, and the
reactions of the spectators may in turn influence the
action under way. The origins of the happening cannot to
be traced to the theater, because of the difference in
the choice of sites and participants, as well as the
postulate of indetermination. Rather, the happening must
be linked with the visual arts. In the course of the
twentieth century, painting and sculpture gradually went
beyond their respective two- and three-dimensional limits
to gradually take the form of assemblages. These in turn
were to evolve into environments and then, with the
introduction of live participants, into happenings.
Indeed, these events grew out of the search for more
direct relations between artist and public, or between
art and life, and the rejection of the power of the
market over art. In Japan, the nine members of the Gutaï
group, including Murakami Saburo, Kudo Tetsumi, and
Shiraga Kazvo, made happenings their speciality from 1955
on through spectacular actions, such as the opening of a
passageway through a succession of paper screens that
were destroyed as the group advanced. The situation in
the United States developed in parallel. As early as
1952, John Cage, who was then teaching at Black Mountain
College, created an environment incorporating works by
Robert Rauschenberg, a ballet by Merce Cunningham, a poem
by Charles Olsen, and the music of David Tudor in a
single space. But the happening spread in the artworld
through the efforts of Allan Kaprow, who created 18
Happenings in 6 Parts in the Reuben Gallery in New
York in 1959. The following year, French artist
Jean-Jacques Lebel presented the Enterrement d'une
chose (Burial of a Thing) in Venice. Among the other
artists most representative of the early happenings were
George Brecht, Dick Higgins, George Maciunas, Robert
Whitman, Red Grooms, Ben Vautier, Joseph Beuys, and Wolf
Vostell, as well as the Viennese threesome of Hermann
Nitsch, Günter Brus, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. The
happening was often a political (Beuys) or sociological
(Ben, Vostell) gesture, but it might also take on a
poetic or playful form (Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg). Other
terms covering the offshoots of the happening may be
associated with these different conceptions: event
(a short, anodine action) for Brecht, concert for
Fluxus, performance for Oldenburg, and action
for Beuys. Toward the end of the 1960s, two main trends
emerged: the performance, which was more structured and
sometimes narrative and which often put the public back
in its role of spectator, and Body Art, where the
artist's body became a veritable medium.
Bibliography: Jurgen Beckek and Wolf
Vostell, Happening: Fluxus, Pop Art, Nouveau
Réalisme: eine dokumentation (Hamburg: Rowohlt
Verlag, 1965). Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, Environments,
and Happenings (New York: Abrams, 1966). Jean-Jacques
Lebel, Le Happening (Paris: Denoël, 1966).
Mariellen R. Sandford (ed.), Happenings and Other Acts
(London: Routledge, 1995).
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