(Photo above, man tries on ski mask but does not intervene in 5/04/08 re-staging).In Tom Mcdonough's recent article on Kaprow in Art in America, March 2008, Mcdonough said
" The fiasco of Publicity (1970), the first Happening staged by Kaprow upon being appointed to the faculty of the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, was emblematic of this impasse. Not so different in conception from aspects of Household or Fluids, Publicity was to involve groups of students in competing building activities out in the California desert, but this plan was sabotaged by the intervention of a renegade group of students in ski masks who drove up and threatened to set the whole scene ablaze. Only the concerted opposition of some of Kaprow's pupils thwarted their plan, with the progressive teacher now forced into the uncomfortable role of enforcer of law and order. The limits of the genre had become all too clear."
Has anyone come across other references to this intrusion or Kaprow's reaction to it?
dc
1 comment:
In our dinner conversation after, Jeff Kelly said that after the instructions were played out, Kaprow became uninterested in the various hijinks that started to take place and left before the end.
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