Sixty-odd years ago, it wouldn’t have felt like this. In 1960, in the dingy loft on Fourth Avenue that was home to the Reuben Gallery, Robert Whitman’s “American Moon” looked right at home with its tarps and rags and typing paper taped to sheets of plastic and “tunnels” fashioned from castoff fabrics. That’s where the audience was supposed to sit, in the tunnels, unable to see much of anything. “American Moon” was a Happening, and Happenings were expected to look like they involved more dumpster-diving than rehearsal. But now it is 2023 and we are at Pace, the blue-chip gallery in West Chelsea, where this claustrophobic junkyard hovel contrasts sharply with the pristine white walls surrounding it.
“It certainly is as sloppy as I would have done it,” said Whitman, a stocky 87-year-old carrying a hand-hewn hiking stick to steady his gait. He was 25 when “American Moon” was first performed. “It’s so crazy to see this mess at Pace.”
It was even crazier to watch the rehearsal that just ended. Whitman’s Happening is being restaged at Pace this week, accompanied by a small show of related art works and the auction of 500 NFTs depicting imaginary planets and black holes. “American Moon” was largely inspired by talk of a space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Russkies were about to send the first man into space. Suddenly there was talk of a man on the moon.
But there’s not much moon in “American Moon,” and no talk at all. Instead you get a nasty buzzing sound, two people rolling around violently on the floor, a woman pinned beneath an enormous plastic-wrap balloon, and at the end, when the audience is allowed out of the tunnels, a guy on a swing directly above their heads, everybody hoping the ropes will hold.
So to start with the obvious question — why cram the audience into tunnels? Enterprising journalists have been asking Whitman such questions for years, not realizing it will get them nowhere. “I used to try to explain things to myself — what I was doing,” he said. “Then I suddenly realized my ideas and thoughts and rationalizations were nonsense, and I just decided to go with my intuition.”
JIM DINE, Red Grooms, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Whitman: this was the core group, the artists who made the Happenings happen. Whitman never liked the term, but it became inescapable after the 1959 debut of Kaprow’s seminal “18 Happenings in 6 Parts” at the Reuben Gallery. The movement was almost as ephemeral as the works themselves — incubated at Kaprow’s classes at Rutgers around 1958, performed in a handful of Lower Manhattan art spaces from 1959 to 1963, declared dead and buried the moment it was discovered by tourists and the uptown set. But its influence has been as long-lasting as the phenomenon itself was brief. Performance art, installation art — Happenings forged a path for both; they’re reflected today in such immersive theater productions as Punchdrunk’s “Sleep No More” and Third Rail Projects’ “Then She Fell.” For something that’s been largely forgotten, they’ve proven strangely disruptive.
“I wish I could have gone backward in time, really, to see Robert Whitman’s performance before I began my first moving image works,” the multimedia artist Tony Oursler confessed in a 2003 talk at the Dia Art Foundation in Beacon, N.Y. “I feel they are a missing link in a genealogy that I thought I knew.”
Whitman was a student at Rutgers when Kaprow, who taught art history there, inducted him into the Happenings group. Rutgers then was rife with artists who would eventually be famous: George Segal taught there; Lucas Samaras was in the class behind Whitman’s. Kaprow himself was taking a course in experimental music at the New School led by John Cage, who taught not only his own principles of ambient sound but also the precedents of the early 20th-century European avant-garde — Dada, Surrealism, the “theater of cruelty” of Antonin Artaud. Each of these currents would find their way into the Happenings.
Their most immediate influence, however, was the Abstract Expressionist crowd — people like Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. To many young artists in the late ’50s, Abstract Expressionism felt played out. But with Whitman it was more complicated. He’d started out wanting to become a playwright but found that, as he put it, “the energy and dynamism of Abstract Expressionism kind of hit you over the head.” In particular, there was a performative aspect to many of the Abstract Expressionists — Pollock pouring paint onto a canvas on the floor, for example — that led the critic Harold Rosenberg to dub it “action painting.”
Happenings took the painting out of action painting and left only the action. Rosenberg noted that Happenings are what “links together the vanguard art movements of the past 50 years.” Tony Oursler was just a kid when Rosenberg made this pronouncement.
Another way the Happenings resembled abstract paintings: They didn’t tell a story. They started, and then they stopped, and sometimes the audience had to be told when they were over — which may have come as a relief to some. “One cannot hold on to a Happening,” Susan Sontag wrote in 1962, “and one can only cherish it as one cherishes a firecracker going off dangerously close to one’s face.”
Each of the Happenings artists had a distinct style. Kaprow had an intellectual bent. Oldenburg took an ironic view. Whitman’s works were suffused with “a sense of danger, of mystery. You couldn’t quite tell where you were and what was happening,” said Milly Glimcher, who co-founded Pace with her husband Arne in 1960 and in 2012 published an extensive catalog that accompanied a Happenings retrospective. With “American Moon” especially, she added, “he wanted people to be confused. That was his purpose. It was always confusing.”
Lucas Samaras, the man on the swing in the 1960 production, agreed. “Whitman was doing many more aggressive things than the other people,” he wrote in an email. The swing “was about shocking the audience,” he added. “In order to see the art, they had to look up. Actually, they didn’t know where to look.”
Of the original Happenings crew, Oldenburg, Dine and Segal gained fame as Pop artists. Whitman remained at the intersection of art and theater and later added technology to the mix. He programmed the final performance in “9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering,” the now-legendary performance-art series organized by Robert Rauschenberg and the Bell Labs engineer Billy Kluver in 1966. The following year he joined Rauschenberg and Kluver in starting E.A.T., Experiments in Art and Technology, an organization devoted to pairing artists with engineers — with “the guys who do stuff,” in Whitman’s estimation.
Whitman’s more recent contributions have been few in number but much more ambitious in scope. In 2011, he sent two people onto the Hudson River in a flaming rowboat. (The water was just a few inches deep, but only he and the people in the boat knew that.) This was for “Passport,” a double performance commissioned by Montclair State University in New Jersey and Dia Beacon in New York — and presented at each place simultaneously, making it impossible for anyone to experience the whole thing in real life. Now that we live in the land of Zoom, that seems strangely prescient.
“We’re in such a mediated moment — we exist talking to each other through screens,” said Zach Morris, coartistic director of Third Rail. “We have nothing but frames between us, so the desire to dissolve those frames feels very normal and organic.”
“I believe we are hard-wired to want to have embodied experiences — communal experiences,” Morris continued. “It’s fundamental to who we are as a species. And the bubbling up of this sort of work” — immersive theater, immersive art installations, the revival of a Happening — “feels so much like a response to the cultural moment we’re in.” Which makes “American Moon” an active link, time warp and all.
Robert Whitman: American Moon
Through Feb. 3, Pace Gallery, 508 West 25th Street, Manhattan, with live performances Wednesday through Friday; 212-421-3292; pacegallery.com
