The Spectacle of the Anti-Spectacle: Happenings and the Situationist International

Abstract

expressionism: like American art of late 1940s, they are a moral act, a human stand of great urgency, whose professional status qua art is less a criterion than their certainty as an ultimate existential commitment (Happenings 60). He distinguished happening, however, from tragic vision of older painters by saying that happenings [live] out purest melodrama, which he saw as most prevalent theatrical form in American culture (61). While no one refers to Brecht in this context, it is clear that tragedy of expressionist variety was seen as a culturally conservative and co-optable form. Yet Kaprow's avowal of an ultimately existential commitment can only appear to avoid tragic by taking on mantle of absurd. What is obvious from way happenings are structured, so that no one element is more important in its execution than any other, and in which indeterminacy provides a measure of freedom from control, is that anarchy appears to be guiding principle. Kaprow says as much in a 1958 manifesto, Untitled Essay (5). In apparent contradiction to this, he distrusted an anything goes attitude and adamantly believed in appropriate direction: [Responsibility for its proper execution still remains. Someone has to be in charge (Kirby 52). Following this premise, happening is to have an ethical effect on its audience/participants. Suvin believed, however, that the only value-system implied is basic biological solidarity of human beings (128), while at another point claiming that happenings thus succumb to a Rousseauist myth. He quotes Schechner as to a basic human celebratory element that also plays with modes of perception (139). Referring to Lee Baxandall's Alienation Antidote Thesis, Suvin states that Happenings at their best may prefigure new modes of human relations and living. Quoting Baxandall's idea that these fragments of a new aesthetics and ethics constitute the outlines of everyday life for post-compulsive, post-manipulated (139), he recalls Rousseau's qualms about manipulative capacity of theater and its antidote in public festival. Combining play element of celebration which became for sixties counterculture a standard response to gravity of Vietnam with outlines for post-compulsive, post-manipulated man meant nothing less than desire to stimulate people into producing their own lives and meanings in opposition to consumption of ready-made meanings and enjoyments provided by culture industry, sensitizing them to life that is This content downloaded from 207.46.13.151 on Wed, 28 Sep 2016 04:54:02 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

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