KaPROW! Texas.
Filling in the blanks, The Happening, and a little Art History
With Stage 1 of the Texas-Sized Diorama of Wonder complete (and the creation of the World’s Largest Canvas Painting of Texas), it’s time to start filling in the heart of Texas.
Part of the Orange Show World Headquarters includes the former Pallet Land, an industrial re-use facility processing pallets. Originally, as a nod to the loading dock’s former life, the interior of Texas was to be pallets and tires, but it quickly became evident that some of the other industrial re-use materials would be a more pleasing fit. A series of teal sawhorses, retrieved from a cabinet maker that had recently ceased operations, provided the opportunity to have a nicely artistic set of risers for the eventual top surface of Texas, and were placed within the 11 sections, raised and lowered to create a rough elevation, starting low on the Gulf of Mexico coast, and rising to 4’ - 5’ on the Western High Plains.
With this elevation set, we were ready to place tires along the marked pathways. In the middle of Week 1, Program Director Pete secured 100+ tires from an Art Car dignitary, just in time to provide material for Friday’s public event, The Happening. Before the event, some 40ish tires were placed to give the public an idea of what was expected, lining Texas’ highway systems with the first layer of rubber.
The Happening takes place the 4th Friday of every month, a coordinated set of experimental activations of the Orange Show Monument and campus. For the Texas-Sized Road Trip Diorama of Wonder, we combined a very real need for community help with building with some super appropriate Art History.
Allan Kaprow coined the term ‘happening’ in the spring of 1959 at an art picnic at George Segal’s farm, describing the art pieces being performed, pieces designed to blur the boundaries between art and life.
In 1957 Kaprow went on a mushroom hunt with artists, composers and founder members of the Fluxus group George Brecht and John Cage. Struggling with some of the sound elements in his own works (which he called action collages), Kaprow asked Cage’s advice. Cage invited him along to his composition class at the New School for Social Research in New York and, fascinated by what he heard about recording, editing and looping tape, Kaprow asked if he could attend regularly. Cage’s weekly homework was to create a piece of work and in response Kaprow began to create full-scale events that he called ‘happenings’.
In 1959 he presented 18 Happenings in 6 Parts at the Reuben Gallery in New York – the first opportunity for a wider audience to experience this sort of event. He chose the word happening to suggest ‘something spontaneous, something that just happens to happen’.
For the Orange Show’s Happening, we took a page from Kaprow’s book and asked participants to select a tire, and roll it into the giant Texas map along the interstate routes. Over the course of three Texas-themed songs provided by The Happening host, participants did exactly that, illustrating the continuing enjoyment of just messing around with things. “Rearrange the Tires” as an activity resonates just as much today as it did 65 years ago (or even 10 years ago, as artists continually re-stage Kaprow’s “The Yard”, filling galleries with tires to arrange and rearrange), initializing the first additive building components to the Texas-Sized Road Trip Diorama of Wonder.
People got dirty, people had fun, Texas gained some traction, but there’s many more miles to go to get all the way from concept to The Thing Itself. Including the amount of tires needed… This first push of 100+ tires barely made a dent in creating the full outline of Texas, not even thinking about the layers and layers needed to fill it in. With just two weeks to go, will we make it?!?
Next up, monument building.