Happenings
The first happenings in England were done by a group of artists and poets in Liverpool in 1962, as a result of my reading an article by Allan Kaprow earlier that year. I had been making assemblages, and as with Kaprow, happenings seemed a natural extension. The happenings were presented as part of a Merseyside Arts Festival in 1962 and 1963, along with poetry-and-music and folk-evenings. The “events”, as we called them, quickly became a popular form of entertainment: a mixture of poetry, rock’n’roll and assemblage. The early ones like City (1962), by Adrian Henri/John Gorman/ Roger McGough, used a taped music track. Later events had live music by local “Merseybeat” groups, for instance the Roadrunners and the Clayton Squares, as in Nightblues, 1963.
Adrian Henri, Total Art: Environments, Happenings and Performance. London: Thames and Hudson, 1974, p. 117
CITY EVENT: An Introduction - 1962
City, an event with McGough and Gorman for the Merseyside Arts Festival, Hope Hall, Liverpool
An “event” is a sort of theatrical or dramatic ritual happening aimed at working directly on the consciousness of those experiencing it. It uses mime, dance, poetry, painting and music mixed in varying proportions. The audience are contained within an environment, which is also part of the action.
The “events” so far organised have taken place in New York (this one is, as far as we know, the first to take place in England). They have usually been produced by painters (although basically theatrical) and small art galleries are often used. Intimacy of setting is essential. The painters who have been involved in “events” have been the new school of ‘Assemblage’ painters – Alan Kaprow, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenberg and Robert Rauschenberg. These artists, as a reaction against ‘pure’ action-painting of the post-war New York school, have returned to the earlier Dada and Surrealist idea of using intrisically worthless junk as material for painting and sculpture. Thus painting and sculpture tend to come together, and from this attitude it is a short step to using music, vocal imagery and live actors in a 3-dimensional ‘canvas’. The great pre-war Surrealist exhibitions were the direct ancestors of these ‘events’. (…)
The two specifically 20th century art-forms jazz and the cinema, are both products of a team, and are to a greater or lesser extent improvisatory or ‘fluid’ in conception. A jazz attitude is at the back of these ‘events’ and ‘happenings’ which are in effect what musicians call ‘head-arrangements’ (i.e. not written out but largely pre-determined)
Death of a Bird in the City, Hope Hall, Liverpool, 1962
One great misconception about happenings is that they are improvised, or just happen’. Nothing could be further from the truth. Kaprow often used a strict timing sequence or a code of movement notation.
Oldenburg used a system of lights in ‘Fotodeath’ to regulate the action. I use music as the limiting factor in mine. It determines the length and sequence of the piece. Almost all are strictly scripted. What does happen is that the performer can make small existential alterations to details in performance: the crowd may fill a space free at rehearsal, for instance. The apparently random works of John Cage and his followers are in fact called ‘aleatory’ rather than ‘improvised’. Cage’s music is as exactly programmed as Bach, what is left is freedom for the performer to alter the pre-determined sequence if necessary.
Adrian Henri, from Notes on Painting and Poetry, 1968
THE MACHINE: An Introduction - 1963
The Machine, event with McGough and Gorman for the Merseyside Arts Festival, Hope Hall, Liverpool
Subsequent Events at the ‘Hopie’ included ‘Death of a Bird in the City’ and ‘The Machine’, while the sixth such happening ‘Nightblues’ was something of a breakthrough as it featured live music from a local rhythm and blues group, The Roadrunners. Significantly, from here on poetry-and-music on Merseyside evolved in a rock/R&B context rather than jazz – reflecting the dominance of beat groups and rock ’n’ roll in the city generally.
This cultural crossover also applied to the audience. From the start the Events, and the burgeoning poetry circuit, attracted the kind of young folk that followed The Beatles and the other bands in the Cavern club, rather than a traditionally ‘arty’ crowd. Ringo Starr and George Harrison turned up in the audience at one Hope Hall reading.
We even staged a couple of Events in the Cavern itself – ‘Bomb’ in 1964, and ‘The Black and White Show’ in ’65 – involving Henri, Patten, The Clayton Squares and others. ‘Bomb’ evoked nuclear doom in the bomb-shelter environment of what by now was the world’s most famous club; ‘Black and White…’ addressed the issue of race relations. Serious themes, but pitched with an instinctively populist edge, a balancing act at which Adrian was becoming increasingly adept.
Bomb, The Cavern Club, Liverpool - 1964
The Cavern was in complete darkness. Somehow 350 teenagers had been jammed between the arches and pillars. Suddenly there was a huge explosion, girls screamed while the lights flickered and we broke into our first number, 'Danger Zone.' This was how the 'event', more commonly known as a 'happening' began. Entitled 'Bomb' it took the form of a mock four-minute warning of atomic bombardment.
Then Adrian Henri, painter and poet, took the mickey out of an actual Civil Defense pamphlet, saying 'Whitewash your windows and ram the dressing table up against the door. All in four minutes...'
After some more poetry the Squares were off again with 'Talking Atom Blues.' A natural break followed...and I mean a natural break, with Bob Wooler and Ray McFall satirizing TV commercials such as PAD...Prolongs Active Death! The stage was then taken over by Adrian Henri who read a poem fittingly entitled 'Frank And Bombstein.' While Adrian was reading the poem, a 'monster', every effectively clad, came onto the stage and strangled him. The monster was played by a gentleman known as Pete the Papers.
Still in almost complete darkness, the Squares began to play very soft weird music while Adrian read a rather frightening poem called 'Tonight At Noon.' Girls were screaming all the time.
Putting the pop image over were the Excelles who sang 'Don't Say Goodnight And Mean Goodbye.' Then they went straight into 'Silent Night.' For four minutes they sang the standard Christmas carol. All the time they were singing, the countdown of a four-minute warning was given over the PA. "When the countdown reached 10, the group sang louder until, at zero, they stopped. The lights went out and there was a tremendous explosion. girls were screaming again as a false ceiling, made of paper and powder, representing fallout, collapsed.
After the bomb had supposedly been dropped, the event ended with two mutants, dressed in black, wandering round the audience to the accompaniment of very eerie music on the organ.
Mike Evans in Mersey Beat: December 19 1964
Six memorials - A ‘Gift to the City’ for Wendy Harpe - 1971
Six Memorials, site of Harry’s Chip shop, Falkner Street, Liverpool, performance devised by AH for the Great George’s Project
“After some quiet years, activities of this kind have begun again, based on the Great Georges Project run by Bill and Wendy Harpe, a neighbourhood social and arts project in a poor, racially mixed area.
In their huge, blackened, tumbledown church building, they have put on a number of environmental theatre-pieces including A Cultural Bingo Show (1970) an extension into a happening of their normal weekly bingo-show for local mothers, and a series of Gifts to the City, weekly happenings through summer 1970 by Wendy Harpe: a city bus on which commuters were given breakfast and a newspaper, wreaths laid by mourners in Victorian dress on demolished city landmarks; a re-creation of Kaprow’s Fluids. At best, their discothèques, bingo-shows and play-groups merge naturally into Bill Harpe’s interest in modern dance and Wendy Harpe’s leanings towards the happening. Both are radically committed, socially and politically”.
A.H. Environments and Happenings, Thames and Hudson, 1974, pages 117-118
The Funeral of Adrian Henri - 1979
The Funeral of Adrian Henri, performance with Rob Con and Lol Coxhill, Liverpool Pier Head and the Academy Gallery, Liverpool
“The youngest artist represented in this book is Robert Conybeare (Rob Con) from South Wales, who works with a group called GASP (Games of Art for Spectator Participation), the other members being Julian Dunn and Harry Henderson. One of Conybeare’s most original works is a pair of trousers made of plastic tubes up which coloured liquids are forced when the wearer puts his foot down. He has also done a number of public outdoor performances involving children, as well as more orthodox happenings like The White Men, which was performed in a Wolverhampton secondary school.
GASP, which originated at the Wolverhampton College of Art and is based in Birmingham, has recently emerged as one of the most professional and fertile touring groups of performance artists. Their repertoire range from silent, white, mysterious rituals based on the simple process of casting plaster to uproarious public demonstrations of Rube-Goldberg-like beer-drinking devices.”
Adrian Henri, Environments and Happenings, Thames and Hudson 1974, page 125