UBS Openings: Saturday Live
Happening Again: Allan Kaprow’s Fluids and Scales
Saturday 29 March 2008
Fluids
Tate Modern river landscape
Construction will start at 11.00
Scales
Tate Modern building stairwells
Construction will start at 14.00
“To the extent that a Happening is not a commodity but a brief event, from the standpoint of any publicity it may receive, it may become a state of mind. Who will have been there at that event? It may become like the sea monsters of the past or the flying saucers of yesterday.”
Allan Kaprow (1961)
In the late 1950s Allan Kaprow, the legendary American pioneer of performance art, coined the term ‘Happening’, describing a unique art form involving people, objects and events. Two London-specific reinventions of two of his most significant Happenings take place at Tate Modern – building ice structures in Fluids, constructing stairways made of concrete blocks in Scales – and which evolve into experiences of the physical body and communal effort.
Fluids, originally commissioned by the Pasadena Art Museum as part of Allan Kaprow’s midcareer retrospective in October 1967, involves stacking blocks of ice into a rectangular enclosure on Tate Modern’s river landscape. Its walls will be unbroken and left to melt over the ensuing days.
For Scales, first instigated in 1971 in the stairwells of the CalArts campus in Valencia, California, participants ascend and descend Tate Modern’s staircases by placing cement blocks on the steps to form new ones to be walked upon, and move their way through the building.
In preceding workshops, participants will work on strategies to realise both works, secure the necessary equipment and design their structures.
Visit www.tate.org.uk/modern for full details.
This event is part of UBS Openings: Saturday Live, a series of bi-monthly performance events celebrating contemporary cultural practice at Tate Modern.
Opening up art
Tate Modern Collection with UBS
Tate Modern
Bankside
London SE1 9TG
Free to experience
