Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life

Allan Kaprow is among the most influential figures in contemporary American art. Famous for creating Happenings in the 1950s, he is also known for having written and published some of the most thoughtful, provocative, and influential essays of his generation. From his first major writing, "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock" (1958), to his recent essay "The Meaning of Life" (1990), Kaprow has conducted a sustained philosophical inquiry into the paradoxical relationship of art to life, and thus into the nature of meaning itself. Significantly, he has done so during a time of epochal change in technology, communications, and the arts. From the modernist avant-garde of the 1950s to fin-de-siecle postmodernism, from the early days of television to the laptop computer, Kaprow has written about - and from within - the shifting, blurring boundaries of genre, media, culture, and experience. In these essays, he philosophizes about the way we define a work of art and its relationship to life. He not only charts the course of his own development as an artist but also comments on contemporaneous developments in the arts. Because he is an experimental artist whose work is "lifelike" rather than "artlike"--More like brushing teeth than sculpting stone - Kaprow's essays are instrumental to his practice and may be regarded as notes in the margins of his career. Indeed, given the relative absence of conventional forms of art (paintings, sculpture) from that career, the essays may constitute Kaprow's most accessible and enduring works. Until now, the twenty-three essays in this book have been scattered through the art press over three decades. Edited and introduced by critic Jeff Kelley, these essays bring into crisp focus the thinking of one of the most important living artists.