Having said all this, the Supremes' 'The Happening' is still a really great song
This whole thing could probably be edited. Anyway.
There's a genre of cultural 'happenings' that has emerged in the last ten years or so. They share the following characteristics: happening in public space, having an air of spontaneity, thus having an unassuming audience, being in marked contrast to whatever else is going on around, having some aspect of interactivity, and being generally about 'the wondrous within the everyday'. Wacky or whimsical unexpected performances, like out of nowhere, in public. Having gone from being vaguely crowdsourced/guerilla-organised, it has become the matter of production companies and further, the matter of public funding. So my personal dislikes in art are something I shall now push forward via politics, kthx.
There is an unacknowledged antecedent to this entire genre. The tendencies of unexpectedness, of being one with everyday life, of potential for interaction between performer and non-performer, and thus the blurring of artist and audience - these are all found in Allan Kaprow's 'happenings' from the 1960s. Happenings are hard to define - an action made by someone, announced or unannounced - with open-ended results. Actions could be simple or absurd or complex. If something goes 'wrong', something new might be discovered. There is no predefined or dictated aesthetic effect. To me, they (and the wider Fluxus movement they basically came from) were part of breaking against the repetitive forms and gestures that the limited rhythms of ordinary life form, and then moralise, into bourgeois polite society. There was a distinct class and and cultural 'breakage' here, an implicit critique, or an explicit one, in the case of the manifesto of George Macuinas, the Fluxus movement's founder.
Back to today. Let's call today's phenomena 'the new happenings' even though I'm about to argue against the relationship.
For a brief history, it starts with flash mobs and ends with The Sultan's Elephant. And it's a cultural field that has done more for public appreciation of 'artiness' than any formal institution. People love this stuff, my friends included.
Example 1: That flash mob where everyone stood still in Grand Central Station, by the group Improv Everywhere. That was, I have to say, amazing. (Just because I am suspicious of a phenomenon doesn't mean I can't appreciate something) Formally this is incredibly simple and incredibly smart. Through the mobilising of a large number of invested, curious ordinary people (none of whom need claim any special artistic ability), and some simple organisation, at a signal they all stopped still, leaving the non-performers in an immensely eerie situation that they were unlikely to encounter under any 'normal' circumstances.
This inexplicable, effective piece of magic within the everyday is undeniably enjoyable and is probably something we lack. My big mistrust of 'magic' in general is this: something magical, by definition, states that 'the wondrous' is essentially an impossible phenomenon. It is conjurable through the use of literally unexplainable powers. It automatically precludes agency and enforces passivity in the observer. Your position is only wonderment. Obviously there is nothing wrong with this as a form of entertainment, I love magic, it's ace. But when - as public arts funding tendencies imply - if we're seeing the specific and marked growth of a larger collective wish for this sort of 'magical' to occur daily, inexplicably, as we go about our otherwise dull lives, what does this say about us? Doesn't it signal a collective infantilism, the idea that we have long given up the idea of any sort of agency, and while these cute things are happening, we don't want it?
Which is why I see these 'new happenings' as inherently apolitical. (or what is the prefix for when something is irrelevant to, rather than anti, the adjective?) The only critique they contain is that life isn't entertaining enough. Kaprow's 'happenings' were open-ended, unaesthetic, about exploration of impulse in the face of embedded norms. They could go in any direction as people preferred. The line between participant and observer was completely blurred. All of this was radically political in the sense that it identified the fact that the space of control is not just in material things like money and police, but in bourgeois constructs of everyday behaviour. In a sense, the happenings were protests.
Indeed, the major genre of all group organised, mass gathering in public is protest, and the 'new happenings' are remarkable in how they manage not to be so. It sounds incredibly curmudgeonly of me to say 'look at all those folks, self-organising their own fun in public for the pleasure of others, how dare they not be protesting?' But I guess I feel that curmudgeonly. After all, the biggest reason middle class people cite for not being activist is honest admission of laziness. So you have a passive, willing-to-be delighted audience interacting with a (admittedly active and imaginative) group of people with, in my view, a kind of misplaced idea of purpose.
Maybe this is all made a little too clear for us in those mobile phone adverts, where hipsters get together and collectively do something oh so cute and whimsical like running around unfurling a big paper rainbow out of stuff. I hate those pointless wankers. Anyway, these adverts connect this whimsy public trend to consumerism in a way that, to be fair, is not really adding to my argument, but celebrates a view of the world in which nobody has anything better to do except go around doing crap like this. Oh, and racking up lots of free minutes on their mobile phone!1!!
I'm not against people wanting to bring joy into people's lives. (I'm not even against these happenings. They're fun. I just worry about what their proliferation means.) It's just, my mum works really hard on her little front garden and when I pass other people who work hard on their little front gardens I might stop and be totally happy I just saw those really pretty california poppies. Being pleased with life around you should be possible through ordinary things done for their own sake, through having an appreciation for the entity known as society. And when you want to make that entity better, you can do it by actually improving society's fabric, which requires engagement and intention and action and politics.
What is the difference between this and any other cultural act, done for the amusement/challenge/wonder of others? For me, the major difference is the collective pretence, between performer and watcher, that the world IS 'magical'. When you go to see a play (in the street or anywhere else), you go with the knowledge that this took work, and that the people around you, audience and performers, have expended resources of many kinds to make this happen - including taxes, labour, ticket fees, set design, swollen ankles, bus fares and so forth. It is a collective and acknowledged societal decision that many forces will come together to make something that not only entertains, but also, hopefully, provides further resources in the form of entertainment, food for thought, debate, experiences of collectivity, and so on. The fact that this happens, this complex and dull myriad of transactions all in the name of that piece of cultural expression, is for me the beautiful and magical thing in our society.
What the 'new happenings' pretend is that this entire 'social contract' doesn't exist. Wonderful, amazing things just happen! You can just be walking down the road, minding your own business, and you can passively live with the expectation that something deliberately, selfconsciously, demonstratively 'wonderful' will 'just happen' to you! Or that you will be the ker-azy guy who engages a ton of disposable time and income in making them 'just happen' (as if the gesture is any more generous than waving a hand puppet at a toddler).
Clearly you don't truly believe this. But the 'wonder' of it depends on - and this is the crucial part - the mutual silent agreement, between performer and audience - that it is true. That it 'just happened'. This is the key source of the work's value, it's 'magic', this is what we actually savour in these pieces of theatre. And I think this value is incredibly suspect, because of its denial of all things that it takes to be a member of society. Oh, isn't that lovely! I don't live in the world any more, I live in magical special snowflake land!
It's like that trend for 'random acts of kindness'. Don't get me started on that crap. Fuck random acts of kindness, what's wrong with systematised processes of justice? All RAK was was the unfair redistribution of wealth solving first world problems on a scale too pathetic to register, and scoring an absurdly disproportionate amount of self-congratulation in the process. All that energy anonymously supplying some stranger with a lifetime's supply of his favourite sweeties could have been better expended lobbying about something that is actually, you know, a problem.
Ok. sorry. I'm now just going off into ranting and not really reason any more.
Might you not just say, well Mia, you work in art, isn't that what art is all about? Providing wonder within the everyday?
And I would say no, friend, art is all about exploring whatever you find amazing, as much as you damn well please, and believing that it is important, and trusting that the world is big and complex and diverse enough that people who may derive excitement from that will show up and appreciate it. And not having to starve if the majority of people do not derive excitement from it. The service-provision element of art is secondary to its ultmate radicality.
I know this is a kind of misanthropist and elitist sort of rant. I am, in the arts, an elitist: that's my job. And even while I like a cultural
phenomenon I just want consistently to wonder what sort of things might be going on in the world to make that thing happen a lot.
Too much time on their hands and not enough political awareness, I reckon.