Allan Kaprow - Quotes

Quotes

• "The line between the Happening and daily life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible."
• "...the problem with artlike art, or even doses of artlike art that still linger in lifelike art, is that it overemphasizes the discourse within art..."
• "...lifelike art makers' principal dialogue is not with art but everything else, one event suggesting another."
• Referencing the passing of artist Jackson Pollock: "...there are two directions in which the legacy could go. One is to continue into and develop an action kind of painting, which was what he was doing, and the other was to take advantage of the action itself, implicit as a kind of dance ritual. Instead of making ritualistic actions, which might be one directions someone could take, I was proposing the hop right into real life, that one could step right out of the canvas, which in his case, he did while painting them."
• "I am not so sure whether what we do now is art or something not quite art. If I call it art, it is because I wish to avoid the endless arguments some other name would bring forth."
• "In this context of achievement-and-death, artist who make Happenings are living out the purest melodrama. Their activity embodies the myth of nonsuccess, for Happenings cannot be sold and taken home; they can only be supported..."
• "Habitats have always had this effect, but it is especially important now, when our advanced art approaches a fragile but marvelous life, one that maintains itself by a mere thread, melting the surroundings, the artist, the work, and everyone who comes to it into an elusive, changeable configuration."
• "Some of us will probably become famous. It will be an ironic fame fashioned largely by those who have never seen our work."
• "A play assumes that words are the almost absolute medium. A Happening frequently has words, but they may or may not make literal sense."
• "It has always seemed to me that American creative energy only becomes charged by such a sense of crisis"
• "This everyday world affects the way art is created as much as it conditions its response."
• "even when things have gone 'wrong', something far more 'right,' more relavatory, has many times emerged."
• "Artist refers to a person, willfully enmeshed in a dilemma of categories, who performs as if none of them existed."
• "Objects of every sort are materials for the new art: paint, food, chairs, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies, a thousand other things which will be discovered by the present generation of artists..."
• "The young artist... will discover out of ordinary things the meaning of ordinariness. He will not try to make them extraordinary. Only their real meaning will be stated."