On 4 October 1959, in a New York gallery, Allan Kaprow presented 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, the work that fixed the word happening in the art vocabulary. It was repeated six times that month. And contrary to what the name suggests, it had nothing improvised about it.

Kaprow divided the gallery into three compartments separated by sheets of semi-transparent plastic. The work had six parts, and in each, three actions occurred simultaneously, one in each compartment; hence the eighteen happenings. Chimes marked the beginning and end of each part. The audience received a programme and three stapled cards that told them where to sit, when to change rooms, and when they could applaud, and the programme warned: there will be no applause after each part, but you may applaud at the end of the sixth if you wish. The invitation promised attendees that they would be part of the events. They were part of them, certainly, but by following instructions.

There is a detail that André Lepecki discovered when studying the scores which I find revealing of the extent to which everything was measured: the events of the work lasted twenty-four minutes and fifteen seconds in total, and were framed by thirty-six minutes of pauses and what Kaprow called non-events, also timed. The pauses occupied more time than the actions. This was not a disorderly avant-garde party: it was a temporal architecture with a clock.

Much more of all that is preserved than one might expect. Not only photographs, of which there are many, taken by Fred McDarrah and kept today at the MoMA. The choreographic score is preserved, along with around four hundred sheets of notes: schedules, drawings, poems, instructions for flute and violin, descriptions of the slides, technical exchanges with sound engineers, letters to secure funding, costume ideas that were never used, and cast changes noted shortly before the premiere. What does not appear is an audiovisual record of the event: I have found no evidence of a film or a complete sound recording of those performances.

In November 2006, the Haus der Kunst in Munich decided to perform it again as part of a major Kaprow retrospective. They commissioned Lepecki to direct it, and it was performed over three nights, on the ninth, tenth, and eleventh. He worked with the entire archive, not with a reconstruction based on photographs. And that is where the problem began.

Four hundred sheets do not constitute a manual. They are a collection of papers from various dates and functions, written before, during, and after the process, which contradict one another. There are ideas that Kaprow discarded, last-minute corrections, costumes that were never used, and even unstable terminology: he used the words act, part, and set as synonyms depending on the document. Lepecki had to decide which documents took precedence: what Kaprow had planned at the beginning, what he corrected before the premiere, or what actually occurred that afternoon. Furthermore, he had to resolve the insurmountable: the Reuben Gallery no longer existed, so three specific compartments had to be translated into another architecture, with different proportions and different paths, and the actions had to be distributed among bodies that were not those of 1959, before an audience that already knew what a happening was.

Thus, one would expect a debate regarding betrayal: is it the same work or is it another? And Kaprow had responded, though not as one might imagine. Among his 1959 notes, there is a sentence that Lepecki found in the archive: each of these parts can be rearranged indefinitely. And in 1991, he wrote something even clearer regarding his own remade works: I call them reinventions, rather than reconstructions, because they differ markedly from their originals. Intentionally so. And he added that they were intended to change each time they were performed again.

Kaprow died in April 2006, seven months before those three nights in Munich. He did not see them. But he had left the project known and approved in its general lines, and above all, he had stated, long before, that there is no original or permanent work: there is an idea to do something and a physical trace of that idea.

This inverts the question. It is not a matter of whether the 2006 version was faithful to the 1959 event, because fidelity understood as identity was impossible and, furthermore, the author did not want it. It is a matter of the score serving to reactivate the work but not to restore the afternoon in which it occurred. And not for lack of documentation, of which there were four hundred sheets, but because what made that afternoon what it was was not on paper: it was specific bodies, a space that was demolished, an audience that did not know what it was going to see, and an era in which that thing did not yet have a name.

What is preserved of such a work is its structure: the timings, the relationships, the order of actions, the instructions. What is not preserved is what that structure organised. And Kaprow, who knew this better than anyone, did not ask for the evening to be saved. He asked for it to be performed again, knowing it would be different, and he called that reinvention, not restoration. It is a generous and difficult idea: to accept that your work remains alive on the condition that it is not the same.

On the open conversation

This text begins with a verified case: 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, which Allan Kaprow premiered on 4 October 1959 at the Reuben Gallery in New York, and its new realisation directed by André Lepecki at the Haus der Kunst in Munich on 9, 10, and 11 November 2006, based on the score and the nearly four hundred sheets of preserved notes. Faced with the usual debate over whether a restaging betrays the work, I point out that Kaprow had foreseen the change: he noted that the parts could be rearranged indefinitely and wrote that he preferred to call the new versions "reinventions" because they differed from the originals "intentionally". I distinguish what is verified (that the notes were used, that there were inevitable decisions) from what is not recorded (a specific list of changes, or the supervision of Kaprow, who died seven months before the performances). If anyone wishes to intervene from the perspective of performance, the conservation of the ephemeral, or reperformance, this notebook remains open.

Sources

18 Happenings in 6 Parts, Allan Kaprow, premiere on 4 October 1959, Reuben Gallery, New York; six performances. Photographs by Fred W. McDarrah preserved at the MoMA. The programme provided to the audience: "The performance is divided into six parts… The beginning and end of each will be signaled by a bell"; "There will be no applause after each set, but you may applaud after the sixth set if you wish".

André Lepecki, "Redoing '18 Happenings in 6 Parts'", on the score, the nearly four hundred sheets of notes, and the measurement of time (24 minutes and 15 seconds of actions versus 36 of timed pauses).

New realisation: Haus der Kunst, Munich, 9, 10, and 11 November 2006, directed by Lepecki at the invitation of Stephanie Rosenthal, as part of the retrospective Allan Kaprow: Art as Life (18 October 2006 to 21 January 2007).

Allan Kaprow on the new versions: "I say reinventions, rather than reconstructions, because the works … differ markedly from their originals. Intentionally so"; "They were planned to change each time they were remade"; "There isn’t an original or permanent work. Rather, there is an idea to do something and a physical trace of that idea". Kaprow died on 5 April 2006.

No record of a complete film or sound recording of the 1959 performances has been located.