The Artist Allan Kaprow s Work - 2785 Words

The artist Allan Kaprow reconstructed the meaning of art when he began to make art that became the antithesis of the typical paint on canvas or sculptural form and began creating environments and performances which enacted the artist’s, as well as audience participation. Kaprow’s work from the 1970s, what he referred to as Activities, further analyzed and assessed social relations and their relationship to everyday social interactions. His previous artworks in the 1960s were also dedicated to social interactions, however, the performances relied on a large group of artists and participants. In the 1970s Kaprow began isolating his scripts from the audience, aiming for more interpersonal events. By eliminating the audience, Kaprow’s work†¦show more content†¦The common thread throughout Kaprow’s work looks at human behavior, an attribute which has a long definitive history among human beings. Aside from our individualized daily routines, such as bru shing our teeth, combing our hair, getting dressed, and so forth, our behavior has been molded into unconscious activities and events which have become otherwise taken for granted. Kaprow’s Activities are performance structures, utilizing the direct life-experience from small groups of untrained participants who follow the artist’s script in a nontheatrical/non-art context. Kaprow implicitly suggests that human beings behaviors are innate and learned. Even though the participants are unfamiliar with the activity, they are capable of following a simple script in order to successfully demonstrate a performance. As Adam Smith asserts in the preface of his book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, when we observe the behavior of people, we do not simply experience events, we ascribe actions to agents; we pin some change in the environment on a person as an action and we do so because we think we see the person’s point in making the change. Smith encapsulates the ideo logy behind Kaprow’s interpersonal Activities, which is that we judge, critique, discriminate and value people based on what we (emphasis mine) individually and