It’s the ’60s all over again! Anyone who has frequented modern art museums in the last decade has seen numerous exhibitions of experimental art from a period that intended to make museums obsolete. “Kunst als ­Leben—­Art as Life,” a traveling exhibit that opened two years ago in Munich and closes this fall in Genoa, is one of the most successful shows to engage with the ambivalence of the ­avant-­garde toward museums. The exhibit is devoted entirely to the work of Allan Kaprow, who is credited with inventing the term “happening” to describe performances that blend painting, sculpture, and theater. Kaprow has been called the most known unknown artist of the 20th century (he referred to himself as an ­“Un-Artist/Non-Artist”), but a spate of attention is the bittersweet result of his death in ­2006.

Kaprow characterized his work as action painting that left the canvas behind. His happenings—­in which multiple events take place together in space and time, and can never be repeated in exactly the same ­way—­are poised between the abstract expressionism of the ’50s and the pop art of the ’60s. Performance art wasn't invented in the ’60s, but it started to be recognized in its own right, mainly because of the word Kaprow coined. For many in the art establishment, “happenings” seemed fatuous, a notion that performance artists did nothing to dispel. “Happenings are events that, put simply, happen,” Kaprow wrote. “Their form is ­open-­ended and fluid; nothing obvious is sought and therefore nothing is won, except the certainty of a number of occurrences to which we are more than normally attentive.”

, for example, instructions were posted in four U.S. cities with separate but linked proposals for the ­participants:

three motor-
cycles ­to
barrel ­past.
Immediately afterwards, they ­write
a careful description of the occurrence, and
mail copies to ­each other.

Although it is difficult to periodize Kaprow’s work, by the early ’70s his emphasis had shifted from ­large-­scale happenings to more intimate ­works—­which he termed “activities” and then “environments”—­that dispensed with large casts, and could be experienced by a couple, or solo. But his works never lost their preoccupation with time, with something that ­happens.

, an exquisite catalog of the exhibition, features almost 300 lavish pages of ­full-­color photographs, manuscript reproductions, exhibition posters, art reviews, and instructions for the performance of Kaprow’s pieces; many of the materials are drawn from his papers held at the Getty Research Institute. It is an impressive trove of art resistant to archiving, art that seeks to abolish art objects by leaving no artwork behind after a performance and by incorporating quotidian objects, a strategy that coincided with the use of found objects for which Robert Rauschenberg became known. But a Rauschenberg can hang on a wall and be sold at auction. How can a price be put on a piece composed of a ball of street trash or blocks of ­ice—­the products, respectively, of Kaprow’s pieces 

(1967)? How can a work that requires the con­certed effort of numer­ous participants be put on permanent ­display?

Kaprow himself struggled with the legacy of his works, which were tied all but inextricably to his active participation. His collaboration in the Mu­nich exhibit as his health was failing is movingly described by Stephanie Rosenthal, curator of contemporary art at Haus der Kunst, Munich, in her contribution to the catalog. For the first time, Kaprow allowed other artists to follow his pro­cedures, to make “new versions” of his works. These reinventions (they are not ­reenactments—­they often take on independent forms) come close to recreating the experience of being in a Kaprow piece, and being “in” is important: Active participation is demanded from spectators.

 is the essay “Writing the Happening,” in which University of Michigan art history professor Alex Potts opens a window to Kap­row’s engaging, frustrating, and at times tedious texts. Kaprow’s instructions glitter with the polish and concentration of concrete poetry. The experience of experience, the gap in experience, is the revelation of the happening, and, inexplicably, to read these defiant activity booklets, these scores of hesitations and diver­sions, is to bring his art back to ­life.

is a graduate student in theater and performance studies at Brown University. 

 Edited by Eva Meyer-Hermann, Andrew Perchuk, and Stephanie Rosenthal, Getty, 2008. 

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Andrew Starner on Allan Kaprow, "the most known unknown artist of the 20th century. 

Still Happening

Walker Evans’s image of Allie Mae Burroughs, a share­­cropper’s wife whose tautly drawn lips attest to the torments of the Great De­pression, is perhaps more famous than the 1941 book in which it appears. A collaboration between Evans and writer James Agee, 

 docu­mented the lives of Alabama sharecroppers at a critical national moment. But Evans’s photo­graphs are not simply textual illustrations; indeed, Agee later admitted that he felt he was providing a ­book-­length commentary on Evans’s photo­graphs. As a powerful work of art, 

 transcends its subjects and their story to become something more than a strict ­documentary.

The photograph of Allie Mae Burroughs is one of the more than 90 beautiful images that appear in

, a theoretical study by François Brunet, a professor of American art and literature at Paris Diderot University. From the moment of photography’s inception in the 1830s, Brunet argues, the medium’s scientific, technological capabilities were in tension with its experiential, artistic potential. As Brunet skillfully negotiates more than 150 years of photographic history, he offers a coherent argu­ment for the emergence of photography as a kind of writing, with possibilities for narrative and fiction that exceed its promise to capture the world as it ­is.

As a subject, the relationship of photography and fiction is hardly new. As early as 1840, Frenchman Hippolyte Bayard experimented with artifice in his 

. (Bayard was cheated of recognition by the inventor of the daguerreotype, ­Louis-Jacques-­Mandé Daguerre, who publicly an­nounced his method of photographic repro­duction after Bayard was persuaded to hold off on unveiling a rival process.) Bayard posed as if dead, and wrote in an inscription on the back of the photograph: “The Gov­ern­ment, which has been only too generous to Monsieur Daguerre, has said it can do nothing for Monsieur Bayard, and the poor wretch has drowned himself.”

While the ­19th-­century realist novel, like the photograph, is a product of that period’s investment in capturing life as it appears, writers and artists have increasingly used photography to blur the line between fiction and reality. In Brunet’s account, artists such as Cindy Sherman use photography not for its documentary fidelity but for its malleability. Her 

 (1977–80) is a series of ­self-­portraits in which she depicts herself as an anonymous movie star, a seeming contra­diction in terms that suggests the instability of identity. Novelists including the late W. G. Sebald have used photographs to interrupt and complicate their texts, creating a hybrid form. In 

 (2001), which is punc­tuated by melancholic photographs, Sebald attempts to reconstruct a personal past and a larger history of the Holocaust with a blend of fiction and autobiography.

Reproduced on the cover of Brunet’s book is a 1978 photo by Bernard Faucon titled 

. It’s a meticulously crafted scene of a catastrophic fire staged with ­life-­size and ­life­like mannequins of children, which appear in postures of terror or delight at the flames that threaten to engulf an elaborately set table, though their faces are inscrutable. The photograph has a startling eloquence, and tells a truth that belies its constructedness. This ghastly ­photo-­fiction might be the only way to speak to the unspeakable events of the most photographed century.

 is a graduate student in theater and performance studies at Brown University

 by François Brunet, Reaktion, 173 pp, 2009.

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Andrew Starner on photography and literature.

The Camera Speaks

In a 2000 exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum titled “Papiers à la Mode: Paper Fashions,” Belgian artist Isabelle de Borchgrave and collaborator Rita Brown painstakingly recreated dozens of dresses from 300 years of fashion in white drafting paper twisted to look like braid, delicately buttoned and drawn into bows, and otherwise manipulated. Borchgrave elaborately painted most of these whimsical ensembles to mimic the silk and damask of the originals; the few pieces that were not given this treatment functioned like a window into fashion’s unconscious—they looked more than anything like the pages of a book tortured into expressive shape.

The catalog to another show that was up this spring at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which houses the world’s largest collection devoted to decorative arts and design, appears to perform the inverse operation: It shoehorns a succession of three-dimensional garments into a two-dimensional book. The message of “The Concise Dictionary of Dress”—the name of the exhibition as well as the catalog—is that clothing functions simultaneously as textile and text, sensuous object and intellectual exercise. A visit to nearly any museum can offer a window into another time and place, but an exhibition of historical costumes encourages a corporeal engagement: to imagine the feel of a corset or the weight of a brocade.

Sponsored by the London-based arts commissioning agency Artangel, the exhibition allowed visitors a behind-the-scenes view of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s monumental storage facility at Blythe House. Visitors took a private tour of 11 tableaux created by Judith Clark, a lecturer at the London College of Fashion who codirects the master’s program in fashion curation (the existence of which signals the increasing importance of fashion in museum collections), and Adam Phillips, a psychoanalyst and writer. Garments culled from storage, commissioned for the exhibition, or created by Clark herself were tucked into Blythe House’s vast galleries of ceramics, textiles, and drawings, as well as in its underground coal bunker and on the roof overlooking West London.

The thrust of Clark and Phillips’s creations isn’t the indefinability of fashion, but rather its proliferating meanings. Each entry in 

—devoted to an installation in the exhibition that represents a word such as 

—has a single page of definitions followed by several pages of photographs. Phillips’s quirky, almost metaphysical take on 

—the meanings he lists include “a form of alarm” and “excited impatience with the body”—gives an idea of how the exhibition and this book frustrate conventional expectations. Clark’s accompanying illustration consists of eight wig forms arranged in a glass cabinet, displaying, among other articles, a sequined headdress in the style of a 1930s hairdo, a knitted hood, and a barrister’s curled headdress.

Readers may get a fuller experience of the installations (which were devoid of wall texts and labels) than did museumgoers, thanks to the illuminating end matter, which includes detailed information about the objects on display as well as a colloquy on fashion in which Clark fields anonymous questions from notable thinkers from a variety of disciplines, including Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt and art historian T. J. Clark (no relation to the lead curator). By masking her interlocutors’ identities, Judith Clark elicited adventurous questions—her inspired response to “Do you believe in ghosts?” will forever alter your experience of second-hand clothing shops.

Although the word costume has fallen out of favor among fashion curators, it evokes the duality of dress, which can be a form of make-believe (donning another’s clothing) or just as easily a form of authenticity (self-fashioning one’s identity). This oscillation of fashion between reality and fiction, static display and animate object, makes 

 intriguing. The wonderful photographs by Norbert Schoerner, accompanied by minimal text, make reading it akin to watching an engrossing silent film with just enough subtitles to convey the plot. Terse and brittle, it is an art-house primer on the intersection of fashion, sexuality, performance, and art. While it cannot explain the current phenomenal success of outré music performer Lady Gaga or what her outrageous outfits mean, it does illustrate that we live in a world where what is on the surface speaks volumes about what lies beneath.

 is a graduate student in theater and performance studies at Brown University.

 by Judith Clark and Adam Phillips, photographs by Norbert Schoerner, Violette Editions, 136 pp, 2010. 

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The oscillation of fashion between reality and fiction, static display and animate object, makes "The Concise Dictionary of Dress" intriguing.