Fluids

On April 25th I participated in one of the ten Allan Kaprow Fluids happenings taking place in Los Angeles that weekend. The one I did was in Pasadena with the Armory Center and, fortunately, the event took place before L.A. experienced an amazing heat wave (pretty ironic since we were all building ice sculptures around the city). I wrote about my experience and thoughts on the re-enactments of Kaprow’s work in conjunction with his current exhibition at MOCA on Art Review:

How many people does it take to build four walls of ice 30 feet long, ten feet wide, and eight feet tall? Turns out that to recreate Allan Kaprow’s 1967 Happening Fluids in Pasadena’s Memorial Park on Friday, it really just took a handful of artists, students, gallerists, curators, Kaprow family members, original participants and the occasional curious passerby about two hours to make the structure, piling up ice, cube by cube. Then we just waited to see how long it would last. It was built to melt of course, it’s obsolete from the off, doomed, ephemeral by design – the epitome of Kaprow’s Happenings. It must be long gone by now – it has Happened.

We finished the project around 1:30 and it was already melting. Sinead Finnerty-Pyne from the Armory informed us that the sculpture wall collapsed around 3pm and, well, you can imagine it all melted pretty fast!

**If anyone has pictures or images on their Flickr of the other Fluids events that were in LA, please let me know!