“I saw it advertised on a poster taped up on the side of a mailbox. It sounded interesting. So we just came by.”
“You did?” she asked, a bit incredulously. I’d already noted that Boyd and I were probably the only two black people in the audience. Today I also suspect we were two of the very few there that evening unknown to the others, at least by sight. “You liked it?” And she smiled. “How unusual.”
This was, remember, 1960.
Then we were going down the stairs.
Boyd continued to question me as to the “meaning” of what we had just seen, all the way uptown. And I continued to resist explaining. But he had obviously been tickled by it all. And clearly it had meant something, though I was only willing to clarify it for myself once Boyd’s somewhat amused attentions were diverted from me and he could tell the rest of the family about the strange artistic gathering I had taken him to in the Village.
Figuring it out for myself, I began by reviewing my expectations from the title: Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts.
I’d assumed that the work, regardless of its content, would be rich, Dionysian, and colorful; I’d thought that the happenings themselves would be far more complex, denser, and probably verbally boundable: someone might come in and put on or take off a costume; someone might come in and destroy a baby carriage. Someone else might come in blowing bubbles under colored lights. I’d also thought the eighteen happenings, despite their partition, would crowd in on one another, would tumble into my perception one after another, that they would form a rich, interconnected tapestry of occurrences and associations. In short, while I had not assumed they would have the singular, synopsizable meaning Boyd was asking for, I’d nevertheless thought they would be rich in meanings and meaning fragments, full of resonances and overlapping associations, that they would be thick with ready-made suggestions, playful, sentimental, and reassuring — like a super e.e. cummings poem; indeed, I’d assumed from the title that they would be much like what many “happenings,” as other artists took over the term, were actually to be in the next decades (beginning the banalization that led to the Diana Ross hit).
The work I’d experienced had been, however, spare, difficult, minimal, constituted largely by absence, isolation, even distraction. For all its immense framing in wood and polyethylene, the actual work was even difficult to locate as to its start, content, style, or end. (Other than the chattering toy, Boyd and I were very unsure which were “our” actual happenings and which were things that merely facilitated them.) An hour later at home, however, I was already reflecting to myself that a little arithmetic might have disabused me of some of my expectations of meaningful richness: eighteen happenings in six parts generally suggests about three happenings per part, which, in turn, suggests Apollonian concentration, sparsity, and analysis — not Dionysian plenitude.
But what exactly had been our three happenings? Or had there been only one happening in our room, while four or five took place in one of the others? Or perhaps the title had simply lied about the work: either by accident or design, there could have been a few, or many, more than (or less than) eighteen happenings deployed among the chambers. In our isolated groups there was no way to know for sure.
Had there, indeed, been six chambers?
I, of course, had expected the “six parts” to be chronologically successive, like acts in a play or parts in a novel — not spatially deployed, separate, and simultaneous, like rooms in a hotel or galleries in a museum. I’d expected a unified theatrical audience before some temporally bounded theatrical whole. But it was precisely in this subversion of expectations about the “proper” aesthetic employment of time, space, presence, absence, wholeness, and fragmentation, as well as the general locatability of “what happens,” that made Kaprow’s work signify: his happenings — clicking toys, burning candles, pounded drums, or whatever — were organized in that initial work very much like historical events.
No two groups had seen the same ones. No group was even sure what the other groups were seeing. No one in the audience — nor, possibly, the artist or any of his assistants — could have more than an inkling (at best a theory) of the relation of a textured and specific experiential fragment to any totalized whole. Nor could the audience be sure any authoritative statement about it, from the artist’s title to the announcement of the work’s conclusion, was the truth.
Beginning with the separate chambers, the unity of the audience had been shattered as much as any other aspect of the work.
And of course there still remained the question for me over the next few days: how, in our heightened state of attention, could we distinguish what a single happening was? What constituted the singularity that allowed the eighteen to be enumerable? Had the performance of our windup toy been one happening? Or was the winding up one happening, its walking about a second, and its running down still a third? And how were we to distinguish facilitation from content — that is, how were we to distinguish “information” from “noise”? Certainly noise could figure in the interpretation of the meaning of a particular performance. (Earlier that spring I’d played and played a record of George Antheil’s Ballet mécanique to a frazzle.) But that presupposes noise can be identified as such.
Still, was that mistaken assistant’s momentary ingress with her silent noisemaker one of the eighteen happenings or not?
The impressive three-dimensional frame, which not only contained the work but the audience as well, and that divided the work and the audience as well as contained them, truly shattered the space of attention and, therefore, threw as many, or more, such distinctions into question as, or than, I was ready to deal with. And in a work whose title, organization, and accidents seemed set up to question precisely such distinctions, how was one to fit their sudden problematization into an interpretation?
It would be disingenuous to say that the interested eighteen-year-old, just back from, or just about to go off to, the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference that summer went through this entire analysis in the hours and days after Kaprow’s piece. Exactly how much of it I went through then, I can’t, at this distance, say. “Subject,” “problematization,” and “interpretation” were not then part of my critical vocabulary; but “man,” “question,” and “meaning” were. And they were adequate to much of it. Certainly I had no particular difficulty accepting it as art or believing that, along the lines I’ve just sketched out, the piece was decipherable. Nor was I caught up in the search for narrative singularity — at whatever level of allegory — that, I suspect, Boyd wanted.
Still, I confess now (in a way I was unwilling to admit to Boyd at the time), I’d been disappointed in it: Boyd wanted his singular narrative meaning. And I still wanted my meaningful plentitude. But I can also say, at this distance, that mine was the disappointment of that late romantic sensibility we call modernism presented with the postmodern condition. And the work I saw was far more interesting, strenuous, and aesthetically energetic than the riot of sound, color, and light centered about actorly subjects in control of an endless profusion of fragmentary meanings that I’d been looking forward to. Also it was far more important: as a representation and analysis of the situation of the subject in history, I don’t think Kaprow’s work could have been improved on. And, in that sense, Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts was about as characteristic a work as one might choose in which to experience the clash that begins our reading of the hugely arbitrary postmodern.
The larger point is that this notion of history is almost absent from The Fall of the Towers — from the SF trilogy I planned on the bridge two years later — although I had been exposed to that notion in its most intense artistic representation and had even understood a bit of it. If it emerges in certain of the books’ images (the multichambered computer, the macrosocial structure, the fragmentary social portraiture), it is accidental, cursory — not psychological, not aesthetic, but … historical.