Happening Article Winter 2014

2/)"/2 #"3) of Hendricks’s turned artists and college professors; a high school RELATED EXHIBITION student; and an energetic group of New Jersey as Non-Site Museum docents with backgrounds The Sky Is the Limit on view through January 5 in ballet, photography, and storytell- Princeton’s Happening ing. The core group of performers was later joined by a Princeton post- The audience then gathered up Just before noon in the middle of a New Jersey doc and his wife, participating in the all one hundred boxes, slowly car- performance in celebration of their ried them to the Museum’s lobby, winter in 1969, a twelve-by-one-hundred-foot third wedding anniversary. and began to open them, releasing sheet of polyethylene plastic dropped over the As the audience poured into the dozens of “Fluxus saints” into the heads of Rutgers University students attending theater at 5:45 p.m. on October 10, glass entryway so that their spirit their weekly assembly in Douglass College’s they were greeted by people stamp- and energy magically hung in the ing “Cloudsmith” cards with names as “planets” and “heavenly bodies” atmosphere. As Hendricks’s former Voorhees Chapel, signaling the beginning of of clouds—stratus, cumulus, cirrus, circulating over the audience. student Keary Rosen remarked, “it Geoffrey Hendricks’s Happening The Sky Is the nimbus, or Fluxus—and a “cloud- As the objects’ movement began was a beautiful and poetic expres- Limit. As the event unfolded, several performers catching machine” made from a lime to calm, two performers walked the sion of some of the key elements of infiltrated the audience, wrestling each other, spreader filled with flowers. On stage, cloud machine to the center of the Geoffrey’s work, a great example of a the brilliant blue-and-white light of stage, gently covering the wildflowers Fluxus performance, and a sensitive, wrapping each other in toilet paper, and three simultaneous projections threw with billowing clouds of shaving yet fun, tribute to key figures of the rearranging a stack of one hundred white boxes. images of the sky onto participants cream and adorning the contraption Fluxus movement.” Geoffrey Hendricks, The Sky Is the Limit, February 13, 1969. Happening, This fall, in tribute to that performance, as well dressed from head to toe in white, with white balloons. In the final Breaking through the limits of a Voorhees Chapel, Douglass College. Photograph by Das Anudas. as to numerous other Happenings staged in who silently constructed white boxes, moments, under strobe lights, the replay of the original, Hendricks’s Collection of the artist, New York. © Geoffrey Hendricks / image © Das filling them with large white balloons boxes on stage were hurled, tossed, The Sky Is the Limit provided a unique Anudas / photo: Bruce M. White the Garden State, the Museum commissioned tied to images of Fluxus artists. The and circulated into and around the opportunity for the Princeton com- Hendricks to choreograph the piece anew in conjunction with the exhibition New Jersey as Non-Site, performance began with the sounds audience. The juxtaposition of such munity to be incorporated into the which examines the ways New Jersey was a catalyst and laboratory for breakthroughs in avant-garde of Fluxus artist Joe Jones’s “Music chaos overlaid with the serenity of tradition of New Jersey’s avant-garde. art from 1950 to 1975. Machines” enveloping the theater the cloud/sky projects, according as the cloud-catching machine, with to performer Allegra D’Adamo, Monica Barra !"#$%&'() *+&#"$ ,!" -%, .-'/0,1 of Douglass its autumnal bouquet, was rolled “mirrored life’s unexpected twists and Doctoral student, Anthropology, College in 1956, and together with Allan Kaprow, Robert down the aisle and up to the stage. turns . No matter what was going CUNY Graduate Center Watts, and others, he helped turn the New Brunswick Performers carefully began arrang- on in the foreground—bouncing balls, Andrew W. Mellon Research Assistant campus into a center for artistic and pedagogical innova- ing towers of white boxes as clouds shifting boxes—there was always the tion. Like many of the early Happenings that occurred were projected upon them. As several hum of life in the background.” in New Jersey, The Sky Is the Limit embraced ideas of audience members later remarked, play, improvisation, and the transformation of seemingly the machinelike movements of box ordinary environments—such as the sky above us—into making conveyed the sense of people ephemeral works of art. These Happenings became the working in a “cloud factory.” precursors to experimental performance art and, in In the midst of construction, particular, to the Fluxus art movement—an international several performers launched white group of avant-garde artists and composers working in beach balls of various sizes into the a range of media who embrace an “anti-art” aesthetic reflected, “My 1969 Happening certainly provided the audience. Instantly the room was often requiring the participation of spectators. Both armature for the performance at Princeton, but with a filled with the laughter and energy of Happenings and Fluxus trace their antecedents to the totally different kind of space—a small, dark proscenium the spectators. After several minutes, work of composer John Cage, whose classes at the New theater in contrast to a large, open light chapel—and in a dramatic sweep, a white sheet School in the late 1950s were attended by several mem- with forty-four years having elapsed, so that I too am a was unfurled over the theater. Small bers of the Rutgers faculty, including Hendricks. different person, it became something else.” Ping-Pong balls, as well as the beach Associated with the Fluxus movement since its Two days before the reperformance, held in Murray balls, were then tossed on top of this inception, Hendricks has styled himself as a “Cloudsmith,” Dodge Theater, participants met each other and the artist “sky,” which extended from the back in reference to his extensive use of sky imagery in paint- for the first time. Unlike the student group from 1969, wall of the theater to the front of ings, on objects, and in installations and performances. the Princeton performers ranged in age and experience the stage. Lit from above, the fabric In rescoring The Sky Is the Limit for Princeton, Hendricks and included Princeton undergraduates; members of the was pushed and pulled overhead, $(") *+,% +#- .**.)"$%: Scenes from the October 10, 2013, Happening at Princeton. incorporated several new elements into the piece. As he Museum’s curatorial and education staff; former students activating the various small objects Photos: Frank Wojciechowski 8 !"#$%& 2014 artmuseum.princeton.edu 9.

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