Happening: 1950s-60s Performance Events That Blurred Art and Life

In October 1959, a small audience climbed to the second floor of the Reuben Gallery in New York City. They were given a programme of events and instructions on how to behave, including when to take their seats, when to move between three separate spaces, and when applause was appropriate (at the very end only). For ninety minutes, they experienced eighteen simultaneous performances: painters painting on canvases, a procession of performers, readings from placards, the playing of musical instruments, and, at the close, two performers saying single-syllable words like "but" and "well" as four huge scrolls fell from a horizontal bar between them. A bell rang twice to signal the end. The artist who organized this event called it 18 Happenings in 6 Parts. His name was Allan Kaprow, and the word he chose for the format, "Happening," would enter the vocabulary of art and popular culture for decades.

A Happening is a performance event, typically staged in the late 1950s and 1960s, that combines elements of painting, poetry, music, dance, and theatre into a single live action. Happenings were not plays. They had no narrative, no plot, and no consistent characters. They were not concerts. They had no score in the conventional sense. They were structured events in which the audience was not a passive observer but a participant, and in which the boundary between art and everyday life was deliberately dissolved. Kaprow said that "the line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps as indistinct as possible." Read the full account at Tate.

This entry covers what Happenings were, how they emerged from action painting and John Cage's experimental composition class, who the key artists were, and how the format influenced performance art, Fluxus, and immersive art.

What Was a Happening?

Despite their name, Happenings were not spontaneous. They were tightly planned and scripted. The Tate account of 18 Happenings in 6 Parts notes that "the environments, actions, sound, light and the timing were all integral parts" of the work. Invitations told audience members: "you will become part of the happenings; you will simultaneously experience them." The audience was given instructions on when to move, when to sit, and when to applaud. The structure was carefully composed, even if individual actions within it allowed for chance and improvisation.

Kaprow chose the word "happening" to suggest "something spontaneous, something that just happens to happen." But the spontaneity was in the experience, not in the preparation. Judith Rodenbeck, in her book Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings, argues that Happenings were "far more ambivalent, negative, and even creepy than they have been portrayed, either in contemporaneous accounts or in more recent efforts to connect them to contemporary art's participatory strategies." She calls Happenings "radical prototypes" of performance art that offered "not a happy communalism but a strong and canny critique of contemporary sociality." Read about the book at MIT Press.

Happenings were an extension of action painting into live performance. Kaprow had studied painting with Hans Hofmann, one of the key exponents of Abstract Expressionism, in the 1940s. He was less interested in the art object than in the way it was created. Hans Namuth's 1951 photographs and film of Jackson Pollock making his paintings showed the artist within the work, his body in motion as part of the creative process. After Pollock's death in 1956, Kaprow wrote an essay on Pollock's legacy, suggesting that the art to come would incorporate everyday life and everyday objects.

Origins and History

Precursors (1952-1957)

The direct precursor to Happenings was the untitled event at Black Mountain College in 1952, organized by John Cage. Cage placed the audience in the center of the room with performers around the edges: Robert Rauschenberg played Edith Piaf records on a wind-up phonograph, Merce Cunningham danced, Charles Olson and M. C. Richards read poetry, and Rauschenberg's white paintings were suspended from the ceiling. The event had no narrative and no fixed sequence. It was a composition of independent actions occurring simultaneously, and it established the model that Kaprow would develop into the Happening.

In 1957, Kaprow went on a mushroom hunt with George Brecht and John Cage, two figures who would become central to the experimental art scene. Struggling with sound elements in his own works, which he called "action collages," Kaprow asked Cage for advice. Cage invited him to his composition class at the New School for Social Research in New York. Kaprow was fascinated by what he heard about recording, editing, and looping tape, and he asked to attend regularly. Cage's weekly homework was to create a piece of work, and in response Kaprow began creating full-scale events that he called Happenings.

The First Happenings (1958-1960)

Kaprow coined the term "Happening" in 1958. The first public Happening was 18 Happenings in 6 Parts at the Reuben Gallery in October 1959. The Reuben Gallery, located in a second-floor loft, was one of several New York galleries that supported experimental performance in this period. Other artists quickly adopted the format. Claes Oldenburg staged The Street in 1960 at the Judson Gallery, using cardboard, newspaper, and found objects to create an environment of urban debris that performers moved through. Jim Dine presented The Car Crash (1960) at the Reuben Gallery, a more theatrical Happening that used repeated actions and sound to evoke the violence of an automobile accident.

Expansion and Mainstreaming (1960-1966)

By the early 1960s, Happenings were being staged across New York and beyond. Kaprow continued to produce them, including Fluids (1967), in which a rectangular structure of ice blocks was built and left to melt in the Southern California sun. Other artists who produced Happenings during this period included Robert Whitman, Red Grooms, Al Hansen, and Carolee Schneemann, whose Meat Joy (1964) involved nude performers dancing with raw fish, chicken, and wet paint.

The term "happening" entered popular culture. Fashionable people attended Kaprow's events, which helped popularize the word as a way to describe something cutting edge or cool. By 1966, it was mainstream enough for The Supremes to use it as the title for a song. Kaprow himself eventually dropped the term, preferring to call his later works "Activities" and describing himself as an "Un-artist."

Legacy and Influence (1970s-Present)

Happenings directly influenced the development of Fluxus, performance art, and immersive art. Fluxus artists, many of whom had attended Cage's New School classes alongside Kaprow, developed the Happening format into shorter, more minimal "events" based on simple written instructions. Performance artists of the 1970s extended the emphasis on the artist's body and live action. Contemporary immersive art, from Meow Wolf to teamLab, inherits the Happening's principle that the audience should be inside the work rather than observing it from outside.

Key Artists and Works

Allan Kaprow (1927-2006)

Kaprow coined the term "Happening" and staged the first public Happening, 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, at the Reuben Gallery in 1959. Britannica notes that "Kaprow's Happenings were an extension of his abstract painting, evolving into audience environments and live performances. He moved away from passive audiences, encouraging active participation." His notable later Happenings included Fluids (1967), in which houses made of ice were constructed and left to melt, and Easy (1968), which involved constructing a bread wall cemented with jelly near the Berlin Wall. Read more at Britannica.

Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929)

Oldenburg's The Street (1960) at the Judson Gallery used cardboard, newspaper, and found objects to create an environment of urban debris. His The Store (1961) was a Happening-environment hybrid in which he set up a shop selling crude, plaster-and-enamel sculptures of consumer goods. Oldenburg's Happenings, as Robert E. Haywood argues in Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg: Art, Happenings, and Cultural Politics, were "born in the midst of Cold War tensions and an increased uneasiness with the direction society was taking" and "challenged the traditional definitions of art in innovative new ways." Read about the book at Yale University Press.

Jim Dine (b. 1935)

Dine's The Car Crash (1960) at the Reuben Gallery was one of the most theatrical early Happenings. It used repeated actions, sound, and visual elements to evoke the violence and repetition of an automobile accident. Dine's approach was more narrative and dramatic than Kaprow's, and his Happenings helped establish the range of approaches the format could accommodate.

Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019)

Schneemann's Meat Joy (1964), first performed in Paris and then at the Judson Memorial Church in New York, involved nude men and women dancing and playing with raw chicken, fish, sausage, scraps of paper, and wet paint. She described it as "a celebration of flesh as material" and it used improvisation in a way similar to Kaprow's Happenings, but focused on the concept behind the work rather than its execution. Read more about Schneemann at The Art Story.

Robert Whitman (1935-2024)

Whitman's Happenings, including American Moon (1960) and Prune Flat (1965), combined live performance with projected film, creating multi-layered environments where performers interacted with their own filmic images. His work expanded the Happening format to include cinema as a component, anticipating the multimedia performances of later decades.

Happenings and Related Terms

Happenings are closely related to Fluxus, the international movement that developed the Happening format into shorter, more minimal "events." They grew out of action painting and the ideas of John Cage, particularly his emphasis on chance and indeterminacy. They connect to performance art, which extended the emphasis on live action and the artist's body. They influenced body art through artists like Carolee Schneemann, who worked in both forms. They also connect to immersive art and installation art in their use of environment and audience participation. For broader context, read our blog post on performance art and the body as medium, or explore our guide to installation art.

See Happenings in Context

Happenings were ephemeral events, and the original performances cannot be experienced. What survives is documentation: photographs, films, written accounts, and Kaprow's own writings. The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles holds the Allan Kaprow Papers, which include significant and previously unstudied documentation and images. The Tate and the Museum of Modern Art hold documentation of key Happenings.

Kaprow's later "Activities" and "reinventions" of his earlier works are occasionally restaged. The exhibition Allan Kaprow: Art as Life at the Getty Research Institute in 2008 presented reinventions of several of his works. For contemporary work that inherits the Happening tradition, look to participatory performance art, immersive art venues like Meow Wolf, and the "events" of Fluxus artists who continue to perform scores by George Brecht, Yoko Ono, and others. For more on related movements, read our entries on Fluxus and performance art, or explore our post on performance art and the body as medium.