Happenings are cross-disciplinary non-text-based events that utilize all media and means at the artists’ disposal, and especially those from outside the maker’s own field. Inspired by challenges in as well as the earlier pioneering explorations of John Cage and Merce Cunningham at Black Mountain College during the 1950s, the term ‘Happenings’ was coined by American artist Allan Kaprow and came to prominence in the 1960s. But it was only with the plethora of live and installation works by Jim Dine, Kaprow, George Brecht and Robert Whitman, for example, as well as later publications by Kaprow and Michael Kirby in response to these, that this distinctive genus of performance clearly emerged. After the 1970s, happenings, ‘assemblages’ and events were subsumed under the range of work labelled performance art. Happenings relied predominantly on visual or material elements, many of which were deliberately impermanent or destroyed during the act of performance. Such events shared much with environmental theatre, often taking place in outdoor or non-performance spaces like streets, shops or in the countryside. They were frequently participatory, deliberately immersed in, or intervening in, everyday life rather than in spaces created for the showing of art. These one-off unrepeatable events were loosely scored or structured and depended on planning rather than on rehearsal or training. They were what Michael Kirby has referred to as ‘non-matrixed’ performance, where performers do activities, tasks or actions in the present time and in an actual place, rather than acting in illusionist or mimetic terms, where they are expected to fabricate an alternative here and now. Happenings deliberately blurred the boundaries between art and life and were rough-and-ready events that were free and accessible and thus operated in a different economy from commercial art. From the RCTP

Image: Workshop participants posing as a ‘crime cartel sponsored Norteña all girl band.’ Oaxaca, 2010. Photo: Claudia Terroso. Courtesy of La perrera