Course: A Happening
Iowa: 1969. 15 x 21 in. Offset lithograph poster. Good condition, though it has been folded horizontally and vertically down the center. Item #POS125
Allan Kaprow (b. 1927 – d. 2006), an early theorist and participant of the Fluxus movement, was an instrumental figure in the development of both “happenings” and “environments,” concepts which in the late 50s and early 1960s sought a format of art and performance wherein spectators and artists dissolved into one.
In the happening which this poster describes, participants were invited to dig tributaries in a river, then to use buckets to remove the water from those tributaries, and carry them back upstream, until the tributaries they had created vanished. This ritualized, repetitive, self-effacing action, far-beyond the confines of a gallery world and with little to do the creation of products or commodities, was a prime example of Kaprow's subversive work, as well as a nod to the then nascent work of the land artists.
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