Arts & Sociétés

        A look at the major figure of Allan Kaprow takes us back to that moment during the 1950s and 1960s when the discourse of modern formalism began to break up and to leave some room for less established positions. With an ever increasing chance of being understood, the time had finally come to lay down a radical critique of the conditions of the arts scene and to attempt a shake-up of everyday life, a reconciliation of art and life, and a break with the warped position of a spectator who remained simply passive.
        A representative of what would become Fluxus and in the wake of John Cage at the New School for Social Research (where he spent time between 1956 and 1958), Kaprow defended a form of “happening” that, as early as 1959 and his Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts, advocated making the demarcation between art and life as fluid and indistinct as possible.
        The idea of merging art and life in a spirit of permanent rebirth took root in the United States in the nineteenth century and was to be found in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman--even though, after them, the contemporary situation was to pass by way of forms of desacralization these pioneers would themselves no doubt not have accepted. Between that time and the 1950s, the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey took up the torch and demanded from artists a sense of continuity between art works, events, and the little things of everyday life that ground “experience.”
        Sophie Delpeux and Gilles Tiberghien see in Art as Experience--Dewey’s most important work, published in the 1930s--a “manual” that Kaprow would have used for himself. In this way, they assess the extent of the dialogue that was established between the artist and the philosopher, beyond changes in the historical context.
        In doing so, these authors raise the question that ceaselessly comes back to us, that of knowing what purpose a text--a philosophical text--may serve for an artist.