Happenings were first enacted in indeterminate, non-theatrical spaces -- warehouses, deserted factories, old stores. Happenings mediated a careful stand-off between avant-garde theater and collage. They conceived the spectator as a kind of collage in that he was spread out over the interior -- his attention split by simultaneous events, his senses disorganized and redistributed by firmly transgressed logic.
The formal question of dividing spaces into white cube/black cube/non-cube is simple enough. It fits into the history of high modernism's theatrical explorations as I understand them. Groups like the living theatre "attacked the senses" of the audience and confronted their levels of taste, but they did not do so in accepted venues:
In the 1970's, The Living Theatre began to create The Legacy of Cain, a cycle of plays for non-traditional venues. From the prisons of Brazil to the gates of the Pittsburgh steel mills, and from the slums of Palermo to the schools of New York City, the company offered these plays, which include Six Public Acts, The Money Tower, Seven Meditations on Political Sado-Masochism, Turning the Earth and the Strike Support Oratorium free of charge to the broadest of all possible audiences.
Factually, I'm with it. Happenings happened in non-theatrical spaces, often the very spaces that the artists lived in. Where I start to strain is where the happening is between theater and collage, specifically that the spectator is a collage.
After spending time with Greenberg's essay Collage though I think I understand where he's coming from. Greenberg's essay is a earnest attempt to define a key moment in two specific painter's journeys to understanding how abstraction works. Greenberg has a special relationship to both Picasso and to art writers of the 70's. Someone like O'Doherty would certainly be knowledgeable about his views on collage. Even if he was writing for Art Forum, and he was their rival, he still would have repressed Greenberg orthodoxies floating in his writing.
If Greenberg said it, than everyone read it. If it's about Picasso, than it's about where the members of Greenberg's Abstract Expressionist brand can find their genealogical basis.
So what is he on about, and what is "firmly transgressed logic?"
Braque and Picasso had obtained a new, self-transcending kind of decoration by reconstructing the picture surface with what had once been the means of its denial. Starting from illusion, they had arrived at a transfigured, almost abstract kind of literalness.
I'm shortening an epic to a haiku, but for Greenberg, the moment of collage is one of exiting the flattened extreme of analytical cubisim and entering into synthetic cubism due to the "independence of the planar unit in collage as a shape." They lost their ability to continue the essence of their brand by being too good at painting things in flattened planes, and had to invent a new way of doing things through collage. It became more real when you glued something on a canvas (at least to the rules of the cubist metaphysic), and for Greenberg especially, they needed for their cubist abstractions to be more real than realism could be.
Happenings often are defined by their inclusion of random people. The chance encounters with art in real life (Marjorie Strider's 1969 Street Works, James Collins' 1970 Introduction Piece #5, Adrian Piper's 1970 Catalysis Series for example). The audience's connection to these events is mere happenstance.
Except when happenings were in the galleries or when people were invited. As I understand it, the audience for this kind of art was tiny at the time. I've seen numerous quotes from artists who talk about feeling obligated to show up to exhibitions from this era as they knew that no one would be in the audience if they didn't. It was a revolving form of credit. If you showed up to Philip Glass's music, than he'd show up to your exhibition.
So back to the audience as collage. If a patently false realism is the highest form of realism, than an audience who were usually insiders and a few chance viewers, then maybe the collage is that the audience is a form of faked random audience?
I feel O'Doherty's intention was that a group of audience members, transfixed by this random event happening in front of them were in a state of collage of random people stuck against the purity of art. By being at a happening, you were effectively glued onto the idealized avant-garde model as a square of conformity in their non-conformist art world. From the spectator's perspective, being unable to look away at a happening is a moment of collage in their lives too. Interrupting the field of daily life is this glued on happening, it fragments their world, complicating the audience member's relationship to real life.
So, the audience is glued to the art. The art is glued to the audience's normal life. The audience is glued in as a false member of the audience, viewing the happening, but accidental and separate from the pure audience. The invited audience is of course not glued to anything as they are uninterrupted in their connection to the happening. They are made of the same stock as the happening. Lots of glue here.
One last part though: the "firmly transgressed logic." Later, O'Doherty defines the principles that make avant-garde art:
Classic avant-garde hostility expresses itself through physical discomfort (radical theater), excessive noise (music), or by removing perceptual constants (the gallery space). Common to all are transgressions of logic, dissociation of the sense, and boredom. In these arenas order (the audience) assays what quotas of disorder it can stand. Such places are, then, metaphors for consciousness and revolution. The spectator is invited into a space where the act of approach is turned back on itself. Perhaps a perfect avant-garde act would be to invite an audience and shoot it.
Now Renato Poggioli enters our conversation. The happening is part of the avant-garde as it assails the audience, attacking their comfort with ill-founded spaces, unproven methods, objectless art, and confrontational inclusion. The work can't be for a new audience, an experiment that is evolving, or even a new format. It has to fit into the avant-garde model by being against your supposedly monotonous level of taste. Art supposedly has to divide us for it to be new. It just seems so old fashioned today.
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