The organizer of this exhibition, Mildred L. Glimcher, does not define “Happenings.” That is, she does not attempt to distinguish them from, say, poets’ theater, Fluxus events, or other types of experimental performance of the time or after. That decision is probably wise. But it’s interesting to remark that she took 1963 as the project’s terminal date, because by the fall of that year, “numerous artists, musicians, and even critics”—even!—“began to create performances that became part of global exhibitions, demonstrations and festivals; the originating moment had come to an end.” Happenings were really only Happenings when they happened among a fairly limited number of insiders—when they were a coterie art form. This exhibition presented copious documentation and relics of a string of such events by, primarily, Red Grooms, Allan Kaprow, Jim Dine, Lucas Samaras, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Whitman, and Carolee Schneemann.

And that coterie atmosphere—which is perfectly captured in the photographs and other material exhibited here, with a shifting cast of performers appearing again and again, from one Happening to the next—is probably what accounts for the timeliness of this recap of a half-century-old phenomenon. A lot of recent art seems nostalgic for an old-style bohemia, as if in the face of the current globalization and corporatization of the art system, artists could still somehow fall back on their own resources and make work for one another above all. Historical shows like this traffic in nostalgia, too. But we should recognize that the wistfulness these props and photographs evoke in us may be contrary to the spirit of the events themselves. Glimcher quotes Kaprow: “The long shadow of Dante or Michelangelo is only a shadow after all, and not the intensity, the electricity that infused their art.” If the poetry and sculpture of the Renaissance masters are merely the shadow of their creative intensity, then these photos, posters, announcement cards, and so on can only be shadows of a shadow. The exhibition’s jam-packed installation seems aimed at evoking the disruptive energy and high spirits of the time, yet the message can ultimately only be, “You had to be there.”

Oldenburg, Glimcher notes, observed that from the start there were two types of Happenings: a more emotive or expressive sort exemplified by Grooms, and a more intellectual variety coming from Kaprow. Oldenburg felt that he himself had created an original synthesis of the two. Of all of these types it could be said, as he remarked of his own, that they were “nonconcrete in content though expressed concretely.” Looking at the photographs, one sees the differences fade away: The events come across as visually dense, scruffy, sometimes claustrophobic, often comical even when eerie. I’d call them polyphonic-perverse. Kaprow’s pieces end up looking as rambunctious as Grooms’s, and Grooms’s as rhetorically stylized as Kaprow’s. Does this loss of individual style mean that the images are misleading? Or do the photos reveal the essential unity underlying what at the time seemed like distinct approaches? Probably both. At minimum, this visual homogeneity means that we need to step back and consider the importance of the photographers who were responsible for finding a distinctive visual aesthetic to match the spirit of the Happenings—especially Robert R. McElroy, who was most assiduous in documenting them, and who passed away shortly after the opening of this show. His images are typically rife with information yet forcefully composed; they succeed in capturing the electricity and mystery of situations in which something’s going on but you can’t tell what. In a sense, that is the legacy—in Kaprow’s words, the shadow—of Happenings: the feeling that there can be an art of things that pass too quickly to be grasped yet cannot be forgotten.

—Barry Schwabsky