Version by William Pope.L, 2009
Allan Kaprow: Yard (Junkyard), 1961/2009 Version by Josiah McElheny Queens Museum of Art, New York 23 September – 4 October 2009
Allan Kaprow: Yard (Sign), 1961/2009 Version by Sharon Hayes New York Marble Cemetery, New York 2 October – 4 October 2009
In 1961, Allan Kaprow filled the outdoor courtyard of the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York with car tyres, wrapped the Hepworth and Giacometti sculptures in tar paper and invited gallery-goers to heft the tyres about. Kaprow, who is forever associated with the ‘Happening’, a term he coined in 1957, called this work Yard. Forty-eight years later William Pope.L re-did Yard indoors, adding Vaselined body bags, mirrors, strobe lights and a taped voiceover. Commissioned by Harvard University Art Museum’s Curator of Contemporary Art, Helen Molesworth, and produced in conjunction with the Kaprow estate, Pope.L’s Yard (To Harrow) announced the New York presence of European gallerists Hauser & Wirth, who are installed in the same Upper Eastside townhouse as the Martha Jackson Gallery had been earlier.
Kaprow, who died in 2006, was attuned to the ironies of artworld success. In the same year of that first Yard, he wrote that fame—his ‘answering the increasing telephone calls from entrepreneurs’—threatened to overtake the great moral urgency of Happenings. In his essay ‘Happenings in the New York Art Scene’ he suggested that Happenings, having been publicised well beyond the range of the very few who had seen them, had already entered contemporary mythology and thus, were defused. Shortly afterwards he relinquished the form he had helped invent and in 1966 in the first of his ‘Education of the Un-Artist’ essays he argued that