Andre Lepecki's exhibition, Allan Kaprow: 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (Re-doing), has been awarded AICA's award for Best Performance by the American Section of AICA, the International Art Critics Association. This award is given in recognition of the exceptional and important work in the visual arts contributed that year by artists, curators, gallerists, writers, scholars, and cultural institutions.
Allan Kaprow: 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (Re-doing)
Curators: Stephanie Rosenthal, André Lepecki
Direction: André Lepecki
Room Installation: Christin Vahl
Movement & Assistant Direction: Noemi Solomon
Sound Design: Sean Greenlee
Project Management Zachariah Rockhill
Construction: South Side Studios
PERFORMA: Esa Nickle and Mike Skinner
André Lepecki, Director:
“This re-doing of 18 Happenings in 6 Parts is not attached to notions of bringing to life <<the past as it really was>>. It isenergized by the forces embedded in the copious and very meticulous notes, drawings, texts, sound and movementscores produced by Kaprow in the summer and fall of 1959, while he was creating the work. We are aware thatKaprow’s work can only be re-done once we embrace it as an always moving, always provisional, always renewed set ofdynamic propositions. Thus, in our attempt to be absolutely faithful to the power contained in Kaprow’s notes (it isonly later that Kaprow will insist that each new Happening would have to radically reinvent its <<original>>) weinevitably started testing the limits of the work itself – its obsessive documentation, its meticulous choreographicdetail – that sets in place its own modes for self-destruction. We discovered that part of the materialization of thesehappenings also, and quite significantly, take place in the dozens of pages of text, drawings, notes that remaininvisible during the actual performances. Each one of those notes, each one of those pages are open invitations forrethinking how the acts proposed under a title as powerful as 18 Happenings in 6 Parts produce new possibilities forrethinking performance’s relationship to its own temporality – and for rediscovering the absolute contemporaniety ofKaprow’s work.”
