Annette Leddy Knihy

A self-described "un-artist," Allan Kaprow championed an artistic practice that moved art out of the museum and into the everyday. His works insistently blurred the boundaries between art and life, requiring active participation rather than passive spectatorship, interactive collaborationrather than solitary creation.This richly illustrated volume documents five decades of Kaprow's life and work. Its six essays range across his shifts from painter to environmental artist to the inventor of the Happening and the Activity, while its extensive chronology features scores, letters, posters, photographs, andclippings, most drawn from the Allan Kaprow Papers held by the Research Library at the Getty Research Institute. Though the forms Kaprow largely invented have lost their shock value and were meant in most cases to be ephemeral, in fact they live on, captured in scores and other survivingdocumentation, still stretching the boundaries of art in the modern world.Allan Kaprow--Art as Life is being published to coincide with a retrospective of the artist's work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, on view from March 23 through June 30, 2008.