Allan Kaprow’s Radical Pedagogy

Abstract

In his article ‘The Education of the Un-Artist’ (1971), published in Art News, the academic and performance artist Allan Kaprow (1927–2006) wrote, ‘Playfulness … suggests a positive interest in acts of continuous discovery.’ This article considers how Kaprow’s programmatic interest in play impacted upon his teaching and artistic practices during the late 1960s and early 1970s. It draws upon previously unpublished material from the Allan Kaprow Papers at the Getty Research Institute, and from previously unexamined notes and annotated books from Kaprow’s personal library. His work Six Ordinary Happenings (1969) is read in the context of his co-directorship of Berkeley Unified Schools District's educational experiment Project Other Ways from 1967 to 1968, and in light of his interest in the work of the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. His piece Message Units (1972), conceived of and performed during his tenure as Associate Dean of the School of Art at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), helps to elucidate his call for a practice-led research with performance art as its focus. A playful subversion of domestic technology, Message Units is understood with reference to his description of performance as a means of ‘basic research’. The feedback sessions, used to evaluate the outcome of such ‘basic research’, are considered in light of the CalArts Feminist Art Programme's 'consciousness-raising' exercises and the group marital counselling sessions he was attending during this time. An analysis of the recording of his provocatively titled piece for couples, Private Parts (1976), gives a rare account of these feedback sessions. The article complicates Kaprow’s ideological division between play and work, addressing the tension between his intention to resist the ends-driven demands of work, and his role as educator and practitioner with a clear idea of how his projects should be executed.