Post #226284 by cynfulcynner on Tue, Apr 11, 2006 11:08 PM

Allan Kaprow, who pioneered theatrical "happenings," dies at 78

Thursday, April 6, 2006

(04-06) 18:44 PDT SAN DIEGO, (AP) --

Allan Kaprow, an artist who in the 1950s pioneered an unrehearsed, nonverbal form of theater called a "happening" that was intended to shatter the boundary between art and life, has died. He was 78.

Kaprow, who taught for years at the University of California, San Diego, died Wednesday at his home in the San Diego suburb of Encinitas. He had been ill for some time and died of natural causes, said Tamara Bloomberg, a friend and associate.

Kaprow's happenings took place in real-life settings and involved unrelated or bizarre scenes acted out by any willing participant. The audience were people who just happened to be there.

A typical Kaprow happening involved people standing around Times Square in New York, waiting for a signal from a window. When the signal arrives, the are directed to fall down on a spot on the sidewalk. Then they are loaded into a truck and driven away.

"Contemporary artists are not out to supplant recent modern art with a better kind," Kaprow said in 1966. "They wonder what art might be. Art and life are not simply commingled; the identity of each is uncertain."

Born August 23, 1927, in Atlantic City, N.J., Kaprow called himself an "un-artist." He was primarily a painter and sculptor working with found objects.

After studying with composer John Cage, he decided to stage events he called happenings, beginning in 1958. He later filled a courtyard with tires, and, in Berlin, constructed a cinderblock wall with bread and jam as mortar and then knocked it down.

He is survived by his wife, Coryl, their son, Bram, and three children from a previous marriage.

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2006/04/06/state/n184436D95.DTL