Alan Kaprow describes his ‘activities’ as having a paradoxical relation to art.1 They involve him performing everyday activities, such as brushing his teeth, but without any thought of the art institution – indeed without any particular thought of art at all (“I could, of course, have said to myself, ‘Now I’m making art!!’ But in actual practice, I didn’t think much about it”2). What is it then that links the notion of the activity to art? Kaprow acknowledges its logical position in the tradition of historical avant-garde resistance to the field of autonomous art (“developments within modernism itself let to art’s dissolution into its life sources”3. In this fashion, his non-art activities have a kind of inevitable relevance to art – they bear the imprint of art’s own motion of self-critique. Yet there seems to be more to it than just this. The very act of re-performing the everyday has very evident aesthetic implications. It involves a work of making strange, of fostering heightened perceptual awareness. It follows a legibly conventional avant-garde critical model: life, the experience of life, has become empty and routinised; there is a vital need to renew it from within, to discover means to lead it to fully engaged reflective apperception. In short, the aim is to re-animate life, but this can only occur through a strategic withdrawal – if not via the traditional means of drawing, painting and sculpture then through the insertion of the slightest layer of difference within the texture of ordinary activities; the sense of re-performance rather than the blindness of action as such. Despite Kaprow’s resistance to the field of art-objects, to the autonomy of images, he describes this layer of difference precisely in terms of the language of images:
This was an eye-opener to my privacy and to my humanity. An unremarkable picture of myself was beginning to surface, and [sic] image I’d created but never examined. It colored the images I made of the world and influenced how I dealt with my images of others. I saw this little by little.4
The metaphors are all of images. They all relate to a coming to visibility, as well as a shift away from the specific to the general. Kaprow recognises this. He catches himself slipping into the terrain of the aesthetic, so insists on bringing things back to the specific aesthetically alienated field of the activity itself:
But if this wider domain of resonance, spreading from the mere process of brushing my teeth, seems too far from its starting point, I should say immediately that it never left the bathroom.5
Kaprow struggles to position his activities beyond the frame of art, or just across its exterior threshold, but it could be argued that this alternation, this shift back and forth between interior and exterior, image and the non-image, experience and reflective apperception, specificity and generality is the very motion of the aesthetic itself. Of course, this is not the same thing as saying that it is the very motion of art itself. The aesthetic represents a space of opening and possibility, art, all too often, a space of closure and constraint.
Although Kaprow’s notion of the activity is distant from Guy Debord’s notion of the situation – Kaprow drawing on a Buddhist concern with awareness and being, Debord focusing on forms of revolutionary social experience that subvert the ‘society of the spectacle’ – they share a common dissatisfaction with ordinary experience. Experience either dissolves into inattentive routine or represents the disengaged social existence of the consumer. However uncertainly positioned in relation to the institution of contemporary art, aesthetic action serves to intervene in the everyday and to restore its meaning, its sense of genuine possibility. In 1957, at the birth of the Situationist International, Debord writes:
Our central idea is the construction of situations, that is to say, the concrete construction of momentary ambiences of life and their transformation into a superior passional quality.6
Similarly, in a 1961 article he argues:
To study everyday life would be a completely absurd undertaking, unable to even grasp anything of its object, if the study was not expressly for the purpose of transforming everyday life.7
Kaprow’s relation to ordinary action is more gentle and less intrusive – it avoids Debord’s superior tone, his tendency to grab everyday experience by the scruff of the neck and give it a vigorous, politically-charged shake – but he is still concerned with changing things, if not the patterns of experience then its perceptual implications. Both conceptions tend to ignore the complexity and ambiguity of ordinary experience – its capacity not only to drift and disengage but also to reflect, discover moments of focus and veer from expectations. Ordinary life reveals its own plays of blindness, intimacy and distance without any need, as such, for any super-added artistic interference or mending. To be fair, Kaprow comes closer to acknowledging this. It accounts for his disregard for art, his tendency not to think of it, his wish to return to the specific experiential character of any activity, yet there is still a sense of underlying dissatisfaction, a sense that the potential of the everyday can only be released via some form of healing aesthetic intervention.
My argument, no doubt equally problematic, is that there is no need for intervention, that ordinary life contains its own powers, that art does better to acknowledge its distance (and the possibilities associated with this distance) from ordinary action. The two fields – equally ambiguous, equally contradictory, equally mobile – have scope to engage in more devious, delicate and discreet ways; without any sense of one becoming master to the other, without any work of dialectical sublation, without any disingenuous effort of reconciliation or merging under the sign of subordination.
- Kaprow, A 1986 “Art Which Can’t Be Art”, readingbetween.org/artwhichcantbeart.pdf, accessed 10 June 2012 ↩
- Ibid. ↩
- Ibid ↩
- Ibid ↩
- Ibid ↩
- Debord, G “Report on the Construction of Situations” in Knabb, K (ed.) 2006 Situationist International Anthology, Bureau of Public Secrets, Berkeley, p.38 ↩
- Debord, G “Perspectives for Conscious Changes in Everyday Life” in Ibid. p.90 ↩
Really interesting comparisons here Brogan. I agree – disingenous is a word that sometimes comes to mind when I think about Kaprow’s protestations about activities occurring beyond the art world.
His claims that his activity of toothbrushing “never left the bathroom” are clearly false – since he published about them within an art world context.
Rather than reaping the benefits of the art frame, but then disavowing art’s importance, Kaprow (if he had been more honest) might have said something similar to what you’re saying here – that there’s a mutually beneficial oscillation between art and not-art, and that the frisson, the mindful awareness/heightened state of existence within the everyday which he seemed to seek out, emerges when everyday-ish activities are poised on the cusp of both art and non-art.
However, to give him his due – it is possible, I suppose, that activities carried out in a particular time and context were not at that time conceived, at all, within the frame of art. Retrospectively (as in, when he writes about them in his essays), they are dragged in. But this doesn’t change the lived experience of them, at that time, as a non-art experience.