First published on 3 April 2018
In Conversation: Allan Kaprow. Paintings New York
On the occasion of the ongoing exhibition ALLAN KAPROW. PAINTINGS NEW YORK a conversation moderated by Melissa Rachleff Burtt, with Geoffrey Hendricks, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Julia Robinson, and Robert Whitman, Hauser & Wirth New York, 69th Street, 8 March 2018.
While Kaprow’s radical innovations in the realm of performance shifted the course of twentieth-century American art, he began his career as a painter, studying with Hans Hofmann and focusing on the medium from the mid- 1940s through the 1950s. During this period, Kaprow immersed himself in New York’s vibrant downtown scene and made a significant body of bold, expressive canvases that presaged his later experiments in space, activity, and performance.
Melissa Rachleff Burtt has written on the subject of photography, art, and art management for a variety of publications. Her essay, 'Do It Yourself:A History of Alternatives' was published in Alternative Histories: New York Art Spaces, 1960–2010, by MIT Press in 2012. In 2013/2015 Rachleff Burtt was a fellow at the New York University Humanities Initiative for her project on artist run galleries of the 1950s and early 1960s. That project was completed as a book (Prestel) and exhibition in collaboration with NYU/Grey Art Gallery in January 2017 titled, Inventing Downtown: Artist Run Galleries in New York City, 1950-1965.
Geoffrey Hendricks is professor emeritus of art from Rutgers University, on faculty since 1956–2003. Since the 1960s he has been associated with Fluxus and participated in Flux Festivals worldwide, and presented the extensive Cloudsmith series. In 2002 he edited Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Performance, Intermedia and Rutgers University, 1958-1972, a book that documents the seminal creative activity and experimental work developed by university faculty members of the 1960s such as George Brecht, Allan Kaprow, Robert Watts and others.
Hans Ulrich Obrist is Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries, London. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show World Soup (The Kitchen Show) in 1991, he has curated more than 300 shows. Obrist’s recent publications include Mondialité, Conversations in Colombia, Ways of Curating, The Age of Earthquakes with Douglas Coupland and Shumon Basar, and Lives of The Artists, Lives of The Architects.
Julia Robinson is an associate professor at New York University in the department of art history. She has organised numerous exhibitions and written extensively on art from the mid-twentieth century, including The Anarchy of Silence: John Cage and Experimental Art, New Realisms 1957-1962: Between Readymade and Spectacle. She is currently completing a monograph on artist George Brecht for M.I.T. Press.
Robert Whitman is an artist who has produced more than forty theater pieces across the U.S. and abroad. In 1967 Whitman co-founded Experiments in Art and Technology and has collaborated with on installations that incorporate new technology. Most recently Swim, a theater piece created for the Montclair State University designed to be accessible for both the blind and sighted audiences.