Allan Kaprow, “Happenings” from New Media Reader

Happenings appear to go nowhere and do not make any particular literary point.
The arts of the past have no structured beginning middle, or end.
Happenings exist for a single performance, or only a few, and are gone forever as new one take their place.
1. context, place of conception and enactment. The place where anything grows up, its “habitat” gives to it not only a pace, a set of relationships to the various things around it, and a range of values, but an overall atmosphere as well.
2. Happening has no plot and is materialized in an improvisatory fashion.
3. involvement in chance
4. Happening as against plays is implicit in all the discussion – their impermanence
This everyday world affects the way art is created as much as it conditions its response.
Happening is not a commodity but a brief event from the standpoint of any publicity it may receive.