"Allan Kaprow's "Tail Wagging Dog" and other writings first published in The ACT"

“Allan Kaprow, the Happener”

“Most humans, it seems, still put up fences around their acts and thoughts – even when these are piles of shit – for they have no other way of delimiting them. Contrast Paleolithic cave paintings, in which animals and magical markings are overlayed with no differentiation or sense of framing. But when some of us have worked in natural settings, say in a meadow, woods, or mountain range, our cultural training has been so deeply ingrained that we have simply carried a mental rectangle with us to drop around whatever we were doing. This made us feel at home. .”

“The problem with artlike art, or even doses of artlike art that still linger in lifelike art, is that it overemphasizes the discourse within art.”

“You can't teach colour from Cézanne, you can only teach it from something like this bubble-gum wrapper.”

“Well, you know, a lot of work nowadays tends to be illustrative of theory already written, and some of it tends to be quite consciously didactic, as if the determination is to teach somebody something. And letting that go for the moment, as far as its value is concerned, it's exactly the opposite of what I seem to find most useful, and that is to leave things open and not determine anything except the very clear form. The form is always very simple and clear. What is experienced is uncertain and unforeseeable, which is why I do it, and its point is never clear to me, even after I've done it. So that's a very, very different way of looking at the nature of our responsibility in the world.”

“Kaprow at UBU archives”