Happening Pedagogy

How Allan Kaprow’s happenings fused modernist pedagogy with an emerging college culture. In Happening Pedagogy, art historian Emily Ruth Capper argues that Allan Kaprow’s famed invention of the happening brought together experimental traditions of modernist pedagogy with emerging forms of American undergraduate student culture—from hazing rituals to campus protests. Capper traces Kaprow’s trajectory from 1948 to 1968, following him through the classrooms of three of his professors who were prominent figures in postwar American art—painter Hans Hofmann, art historian Meyer Schapiro, and composer John Cage—and across institutions including Rutgers, Stony Brook, Cornell, CalArts, and UC San Diego. Although Kaprow’s teachers were educated in the distinct disciplines of studio art, art history, and music, all three designed their classrooms to cultivate student creativity and critical reflection through forms of social exchange. Capper shows that Kaprow transformed these modernist classrooms into new pedagogical environments that worked within the novel context of the suburban state university. Drawing on archival sources, she describes how Kaprow engaged the culture and creative work of middle-class college students, whose rituals he took seriously as an avant-garde vernacular. In this way, Kaprow’s happenings represent a critical extension of modernism as a social practice of sensory attunement, experimentation, and philosophical critique. Through Kaprow’s work, modernist pedagogy became an artistic medium in itself, and his participation-based creative practices helped define the broad resurgence of the American neo-avant-garde after 1960.