ABSTRACT
One night, in the early winter months of 2008, I received a phone call from the artist Steve Roden, inviting me to participate in a reinvention of Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in Six Parts, a seminal performance work that was originally realized at the Reuben Gallery in New York in 1959 over the course of six nights. Steve had been commissioned by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) to recreate the work in conjunction with the retrospective Allan Kaprow-Art as Life, which was scheduled to appear at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and many satellite venues in Los Angeles that spring.1 I had some vague sense of Kaprow’s legacy, and the work in question, and at some point during the conversation a fuzzy memory of a black and white photograph or two of Kaprow and his accomplices in an intentionally messy surrounding, encountered in a book on the artist or on the history of performance, popped into my head.
