Blog Submission

My name is Valentin Gabriel Cristea. I am a mathematics teacher at a High School of Targoviste . I am from Romania. I am interested in participatory art to improve my knowledge about poetry.

Sky

The sky is the place

where the words

become clouds

Participatory art is a term that describes a form of art that directly engages the audience in the creative process so that they become participants in the event. In this respect, the artist is seen as a collaborator and a co-producer of the situation (with the audience), and these situations can often have an unclear beginning or end.

Participatory art has its origins in the futurist and dada performances of the early twentieth century, which were designed to provoke, scandalise and agitate the public. In the late 1950s the artist Allan Kaprow devised performances called happenings, in which he would coerce the audience into participating in the experience. The French film-maker and writer Guy Debord, founder of situationism, also promoted a form of participatory art in that he wished to eliminate the spectator’s position by devising industrial paintings: paintings created en masse. The contemporary artist Marvin-Gaye Chetwynd relies entirely on willing participants to create her performances, as does the activist artist Tania Bruguera. In her work Surplus Value, participants were asked to wait in line and then randomly selected into those who could enter the work and others who were submitted to lie detector tests, in order to highlight the problems of immigration. Happenings were the forerunners of performance art and in turn emerged from the theatrical elements of dada and surrealism. The name was first used by the American artist Allan Kaprow in the title of his 1959 work 18 Happenings in 6 Parts which took place on six days, 4–10 October 1959 at the Reuben Gallery, New York.

Happenings typically took place in an environment or installation created within the gallery and involved light, sound, slide projections and an element of spectator participation. They proliferated through the 1960s but gave way to performance art in which the focus was increasingly on the actions of the artist. A detailed account of early happenings can be found in Michael Kirby’s 1965 book, Happenings.

Other notable creators of happenings were Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Red Grooms and Robert Whitman. Jim Dine’s 1960 suite of prints The Crash relates to the drawings that were props for his 1960 happening, The Car Crash.