June 09, 2005
Allan Kaprow: FLUIDS, 1967/2005
Happening Again
Allan Kaprow: FLUIDS, 1967/2005: International workshop of the Applied Arts Universities at Art Unlimited Basel; June 13, 2005, from 2 pm--To mark the opening of Art Unlimited in Basle, Allan Kaprow's Happening FLUIDS will be reinvented for the first time since 1967 by an international workshop, in co-operation with the Department of Art and Design at Basle's University of Applied Sciences and the University Basle.
'Father of Happenings' Allan Kaprow was born in 1927. Nearly 40 years later, the art form he created continues to provoke questions about time, community and collective structures. His Happening FLUIDS involved constructing enclosures with ice blocks at various locations in Pasadena and Los Angeles. Kaprow recruited participants using billboards that displayed the FLUIDS score: "During three days, about twenty rectangular enclosures of ice blocks (measuring about 30 feet long, 10 wide and 8 high) are built throughout the city. Their walls are unbroken. They are left to melt".
Groups of young people made his work a reality. They stacked blocks of ice, delivered by the Union Ice Company, into rectangular structures. Over the ensuing days, the ice structures melted. Photographs, film, the billboard score, the artist's notes and drawings, letters and press clippings document the ephemeral event. Now FLUIDS will occur for the second time. Ice structures will be built at three different sites across Basle, including Art Basel's headquarters building and the roof of the adjacent parking structure. Co-operating in the Happening are the Department of Art and Design at Basle University of Applied Science (Creative Art - Media Art Department), the art history seminars of Basle University, Basle and Lucerne University Departments of Art and Design, the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and the University of Weimar and Vienna. At the artist's request, students will spend two days in a workshop, devising strategies to realize the work. They will determine such particulars as how to co-ordinate delivery of the ice blocks, secure the necessary equipment and design of the structures. Thus they will create a Basle-specific, contemporary variant of the Happening, this time without the artist's direct involvement.
For further information, please contact Laura Bechter at Hauser & Wirth in Zurich.
HAUSER & WIRTH ZURICH
Limmatstrasse 270
CH - 8005 Zurich
Switzerland
Phone +41 (0)44 446 80 50
http://www.hauserwirth.com
Posted by jo at June 9, 2005 09:39 AM
