Radical Prototypes Rodenbeck Judith F. Noble Chair in Modern Art & Culture Sarah Lawrence College

An examination of an experiential and experimental art form that, despite its evanescence, has shaped participatory art into the present. Scholars, meanwhile, locate happenings in a genealogy of avant-garde performance that descends from futurism, surrealism, and Dada through the action painting of the 1950s. "Happenings" have pop connotations that conjure up 1960s youth culture and hippies in public, joyful rebellion.

Allan Kaprow coined the term in 1958 to name a new collage form of performance, calling happenings "radical prototypes" of performance art. In Radical Prototypes, Judith Rodenbeck argues for a more complex etiology. Rodenbeck offers a rigorous art historical reading of Kaprow's project and related artworks.

She finds that these experiential and experimental works offered not a happy communalism but a strong and canny critique of contemporary sociality.