ABSTRACT
The term 'Happening' was probably first used in connection with Allan Kaprow's presentation, 'Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts' at the Reuben Gallery, New York, in 1959. The first Happening in Britain occurred on the last day of the Edinburgh Theatre Conference in 1963 and climaxed with a young woman being wheeled across the balcony above the speakers' platform in a wheelbarrow. Victor Turner thought that a Happening could create spontaneous communitas, a moment of mutual 'opting out', which Yoko Ono called 'a get-togetherness'. The People Show under Jeff Nuttall's anarchic direction became the main purveyor of Happenings in the 1960s. Performance art united the subjective with the objective, the abstract with the material, thought with action. Albert Hunt was an early practitioner of performance art when he staged the Russian Revolution on the streets of Bradford in 1967. Thus, in Keith Khan’s Wigs of Wonderment for motiroti, incipient or internalised racism was confronted through the use of black fashion accessories.
