Lannan Series

In the late 1950s, Kaprow coined the word ``happenings'' to describe the performance pieces that approximated in art the unpredictability of everyday life. In this collection of 23 thought-provoking essays, reviews and manifestos written between 1958 and 1990, Kaprow takes aim at an insular art avant-garde. Criticizing popular trends in modern art (colorfield, hard edge, pop, video art, assemblage, etc.) as ``developmental'' instead of truly experimental, he envisages a more ``lifelike'' art that probes, tests and reintegrates reality. For Kaprow, who is currently a performance artist and a visual arts professor at UC-San Diego, it is the neo-Dadaist Fluxus artists, earthworkers, body artists, shamans and performance poets who point the way toward a participatory art rooted in daily activities. Illustrated with photos and reproductions of artworks, these essays give Kaprow's take on artists such as Mondrian and Jackson Pollock and on wider topics like the transition of the artist from Beatnik to businessman. (Oct.)