“Forget all the standard art forms. The point is to make something new. Something that doesn’t even remotely remind you of culture.” American artist Allan Kaprow has been described as an avant-garde revolutionary, a radical sociologist, a progressive educator and one of the most influential artists of his day.

Kaprow was born in 1927 in New Jersey. During his early years, he experienced chronic illness that forced him to move from New York to Tucson, Arizona, where he spent the rest of his childhood. There, separated from his Jewish, middle-class roots, he experienced life on a ranch, giving him a sense of the communal activity that came to dominate his later artistic career.

In 1945 he returned to New York where he completed his studies in art, becoming heavily influenced by action painting and avant-garde music. It was from painter Jackson Pollock, composer John Cage, educationalist John Dewey, and feminist artists Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago that Kaprow derived his ideas of ‘art as life’ and ‘doing’ as ‘knowing’.

In 1957, Kaprow began creating works that called for viewer participation. This synthesis of space, time, materials and people led him to produce more experimental work and develop the definitive form of his ‘Happenings’. In this new relationship between art and its audience, viewers could step out of their passive role and bring about changes in the work, which amalgamated sound, colour and light into a 360o installation – an ‘Environment’. With Kaprow, art emerged from traditional exhibition settings to occupy the spaces and routines of everyday life. During the 1960s, his Happenings evolved into Activities, actions that centred direct experience, requiring participants to focus their attention acutely to the world around them.

From 1958 until his passing in 2006, Kaprow created and staged some 250 actions of this kind, accompanied by an intensive teaching career. From the mid-1980s, he began inviting artists to reinvent artworks from his early career, mostly as a means to side-step invitations from museums to recreate his most well-known works. The question of redoing-versus-reinventing opened up possibilities for a new generation of artists to create unique and original reinventions of Kaprow’s ideas and sculptural environments, produced according to their own individual artistic practices and the social, political and environmental issues of the moment. Here James Hoff presents a reinvention of ‘How to Make a Happening’, Kaprow’s instructional record delivering 11 rules on how to, and how not to, make a ‘Happening’. Kaprow’s original 1966 recording is broadcast and picked up by FM radios, surrounded by posters designed by Allan Kaprow, and featuring original scores for Activities and Happenings, available for you to take-away for free. In keeping with the artist’s intention for art to circulate outside of formal gallery settings, these posters are also available for free at selected artist-led bookshops across Scotland. In the Steadings Galleries, you will find Peter Liversidge’s ‘Sign Painting Studio’ and Cinzia Mutigli’s reinvention of ‘Sweet Wall’ whilst across the landscape of Jupiter, reinventions of ‘Yard’, ‘Transfer’ and ‘Out / Exit Piece’ are presented, each changing over time. Peter Liversidge has also created a new limited-edition artwork, with all proceeds supporting ORBIT Youth Council.