Word: everydayness
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...There's no doubt that neither Watts nor Kaprow would have intended a museum retrospective such as _Experiments in the Everyday_. Kaprow's happenings and Watts's mail-order catalogues, newsletters and consumer items were conceived to bring art out of the galleries and the audience into art. To place such objects behind the glass of a gallery frame is to stifle the subversive potential of these works: happenings were meant to be experienced, not looked at through photographs, and the newsletters and stamps were made to be circulated, not framed...
...Clearly, an exhibition of Flux works should create a space for audience interaction and response, which _Experiments in the Everyday_ fails to do. This is more the fault of the gallery institution in the abstract than of the List Center in particular. Unfortunately, the audience is just as trapped by the gallery institution as the work is behind the glass; the visitors gaze as reverently at, say, a baseball "signed" by Du*rer, as they would at a nativity scene. These works are humorous, shocking, psychologically subversive-and somehow that message has been lost in the translation...
...high modernism's fixation on form, structure and dogma. Watts and Kaprow inherited this position from Marcel Duchamp, father of Dada and first to insist that "the viewer completes the work of art." Their process was Duchampian in intent and radical in form: they created art objects from everyday objects and performance pieces from everyday events, decontextualizing those elements and thereby giving the piece a new function within the aesthetic space of the gallery. Often they rejected the confines of the gallery space altogether. Watts's and Kaprow's objects range from industrial plastics to balls of yarn to stamp...
...comes as no surprise that Buchloch, co-curator of _Experiments in the Everyday_, is particularly interested in Watts's work. Though Watts never achieved the same kind of notoriety as Kaprow did, the exhibit grants disproportionate weight to his work, leaving the Kaprow offerings spare but satisfying...
...Nonetheless, _Experiments in the Everyday_ offers a delightful display of two artists who pushed in tandem towards an innovative dissolution of traditional notions about art and artist. In the words of Watts, "one can imagine an audience where the audience becomes the sole activator and responds to itself." Until then, we can enjoy the elegant, complete, yet unresolved gallery presentation of Kaprow's and Watts's work at the List...