This blog post explores the message conveyed by the art form known as happenings, which emerged by breaking down the boundaries between life and art.
One day in 1952, the modern musician ‘John Cage’ gave a lecture at a university in the United States. John Cage is well known as a figure who boldly shattered the traditional frameworks of music and art of his time, pursuing new forms of expression. His experimental approach moved beyond traditional music composition, prompting the fundamental question: ‘What is sound, and what is music?’ He delivered his lecture atop a ladder, and its content consisted of prolonged silence and dance. This act, which overturned the conventional format and content of a lecture, caused a significant stir. His silence was not mere silence. Through this moment, Cage sought to emphasize how thin the boundary between sound and silence truly is, reflecting his philosophy that every moment can become music.
Another artist left twenty massive blocks of ice to melt on the street, revealing the entire process of an object’s constant transformation. The artist’s intention was to visually express the passage of time and the power of nature through the ice’s changes, conveying the aesthetics of transformation often overlooked in daily life to the audience. Other examples might include works like lipstick as tall as a building or an electrical plug. What is the essence of this artistic act, which transforms the familiar into the unfamiliar and the unfamiliar into the familiar, sending humans on distant journeys of imagination?
These artistic attempts are not merely about creating visual shock; they possess the power to make us see the objects and concepts we encounter daily in a new light. Artists use this to present audiences with new frameworks of perception, guiding them to break free from fixed ways of thinking. The genre of Happening literally shows “what is happening here and now.” It is performed spontaneously, relying more on visual and auditory materials than words as key tools of expression. Improvisation is a core element of the happening, emphasizing the artist’s process of breaking free from pre-planned frameworks to follow momentary inspiration. Through this process, the audience experiences that art is not merely a final product, but a creative act possessing meaning and value in itself.
Performances take place in everyday spaces like galleries, streets, parks, markets, or kitchens, not closed theaters, making them highly mobile. Furthermore, events and actions that lack logical connection are fragmented and linked together, making the happening strange and abstract. Dialogue is either omitted or entirely absent, and even words that suddenly pop up often carry no special meaning. Through this, the happening asserts that the pains and hopes of our lives can no longer be conveyed through logical speech. This non-verbal mode of expression elicits emotional and intuitive responses from audiences rather than conveying direct messages. Happenings prompt viewers to interpret meaning through their own experiences, starkly differing from the predetermined interpretations offered by traditional artworks.
This concept of happenings resembles collage in art and montage in film, while also resonating with modern theater exposing life’s absurdities and popular music genres like rap. Is it not the very fact that our lives themselves are ephemeral and not governed by consistent logic that demonstrates the close relationship between happenings and life itself? Ultimately, happenings break down the boundaries between art and life, showing that life itself can become art. They make us realize that the message art conveys to us is not confined solely within the work itself, but constantly unfolds within our daily lives.
Happenings, which tear down the walls between various art forms, transformed the role of the audience in existing art. Performers do not serve the audience; instead, they provoke and tease them by shouting or splashing water. Performances occur not in a single predetermined location but here and there, or even simultaneously in multiple places. Audiences move around following the action, witnessing scenes from different perspectives. This can be seen as an intentional effort to involve the audience in the performance. By doing so, happenings aim to prevent the separation of life and art, ultimately becoming a consciousness that intervenes in everyday life. This participatory art transforms the audience from mere recipients into integral parts of the artistic creation process, thereby expanding the meaning of art. The audience is no longer passive; they become active agents shaping the artistic experience.
Furthermore, it rejects being traded as a symbolic commodity among a select few within the art market. Happenings also resist the established art convention of being exhibited and preserved as finished works in museums. This emphasizes that art is a free form of expression, not confined to specific places or formats, but open to anyone, anywhere, anytime. It conveys the message that the essence of art lies not in the permanence of the work, but in the experience and feeling of the moment.
Such artistic phenomena were not merely movements but rather the practice of artists’ intellectual adventures. Happenings criticized conformity to conventional social institutions and sought to transform fixed notions of art. They were sometimes criticized as incomprehensible, emphasizing chance events and individual self-consciousness. Yet despite such criticism, happenings served as pioneers exploring new artistic possibilities, playing a vital role in breaking existing frameworks and stimulating creative thought. Nevertheless, this artistic adventure—which stirs us, numbed by comfortable emotions in modern society, and seeks new ways to understand the relationship between life and art—will continue to broaden the horizons of art in ever more diverse forms.
