Live Studio Audience
“Forget all the standard art forms. Don’t paint pictures, don’t make poetry, don’t build architecture, don’t arrange dances, don’t write plays, don’t compose music, don’t make movies.”
So begins “How to Make a Happening,” a lecture by Allan Kaprow distributed on vinyl in 1966. On the record, Kaprow, a pioneer of American installation art and leader of the Fluxus experimental movement, describes the philosophy behind his “Happenings”: a series of participatory pieces put on by Kaprow in the ’60s through the ’70s that blurred the line between performance and life, artist and audience.
Kaprow’s fingerprints were all over “Gallery+1968–2018,” a public program hosted at the Yale University Art Gallery on February 1st. The event, curated by Brian Orozco, ES ’18, a Nancy Horton Bartels Intern in the gallery’s Programs Department; Molleen Theodore, Curator of Programs; and Emily Arensman, Programs Fellow, was the first in a series of events at the YUAG commemorating the culmination of the Civil Rights Movement in its semicentennial. Bookended by a spoken word performance by Kamau Walker, SM ’20, and a screening of the documentary The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975, Orozco devised a studio workshop, inspired by a series of graffiti workshops Kaprow conducted with Pasadena middle schoolers in the ’60s, that encouraged participants to engage with the themes of the Civil Rights Movement on their own turns.
After Orozco gave some brief remarks, Walker, a member of WORD: Performance Poetry at Yale, delivered three poems: two original compositions (one was written in his biology class earlier that day, though you wouldn’t have known it), and “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” by Gil Scott-Heron. “The revolution WILL put you in the driver’s seat,” Walker told the crowd of two dozen. Four lines later, the poem ended, and the audience took the wheel.
The curators had prepared two workshop stations. At one, participants used markers and stencils to decorate brown paper banners. Here, Orozco echoed a installation by Chicago-based filmmaker Cauleen Smith at the Whitney Biennial, a series of hand-stitched, sequin-studded banners protesting police brutality: activism and art, intertwined. Elizabeth Kingsley, ES ’19, inspired by the #MeToo movement, was sketching the answer to a rhetorical question: “Women Are To Say.” At the second station, a small crowd of participants designed buttons decorated with photo clippings: Black football players kneeling, arms linked; Clean Dream Act advocates, heads bowed, watching a Jeff Sessions speech on an iPad. Orozco chose to provide no prompt beyond the blank banners and buttons. “In the end,” he said, “we didn’t want to be too prescriptive of what [the participants] should make.”
The YUAG’s Gallery+ events are intended to facilitate community participation, so banner-making was an apt medium. “It doesn’t require great skill to make a banner,” Theodore said. “It’s not like you have to draw perspective or draw figure. You just have to have an idea.” The Gallery+ participants were engaging with decades-old political dialogues. Yet, doodling, tracing, cutting, pasting, chatting, laughing, they seemed like Kaprow’s middle schoolers in Pasadena.
Banners decorated and buttons made, the program shifted into the YUAG auditorium for the screening of The Black Power Mixtape. The documentary, directed by Göran Olsson, features interviews with activists like Angela Davis and Huey Newton. All the footage was shot by Swedish journalists; the American media wasn’t covering it. The revolution wasn’t televised. But, that evening at the YUAG, during Orozco’s studio workshop, it was live. It was happening.
