ABSTRACT
Allan Kaprow, initially the leader of the Cage-inspired artists, suggested how both the Duchamp-Cage aesthetic and the various tendencies within the New York School, despite their opposing aims, together played a role in his thinking. Cage prompted Kaprow to repudiate all received aesthetic ideas, standards, and categories—to the extreme of obliterating every line demarcating art from non-art. Kaprow’s step-by-step progression from painting to Happenings was accompanied by a series of public statements, letters to art magazines, and articles which provide a clear justification for Environments and Happenings. Despite the fact that the Happenings by Kaprow, Dine, Red Grooms, Claes Oldenburg, and Robert Whitman were relatively plotless and unrehearsed, each was shaped by the maker’s desires and appetites and tried to realize an intention and convey a message, an approach that diverged sharply from Cage’s, creating some tendencies in the theater of mixed means.
