Harvard Harbors Happenings

From cardboard penguins on the Science Center lawn to John Harvard’s many costumes of late, unpredictable and often seemingly whimsical public displays of art are a source of intrigue and confusion for many students. But while these public arts at Harvard often take on a lighthearted façade, they also have depth of communication. Several student groups actively promote public art in events called “happenings.”

One such event occurred two weeks ago when, in honor of Halloween, the Harvard Social Forum Arts Collective hosted a “Carnival and Art Making Extravaganza.” Based on a colonial public art legend involving an axe murderer, a human sculpture and twelve artistic, yet doomed Revolutionaries, the event featured mask making, storytelling, and a “pumpkin parade” in Harvard Yard.

“Happenings are unscripted,” said Neasa Coll ’05, a founding member of Present!, a prominent student arts group. “They’re more interactive. That way, there’s an element of creation and involvement in the process.” Perhaps the nebulous quality of a happening event is its most defining characteristic; “They can be formal or informal, planned or spontaneous,” said Coll.

David D. Mahfouda ’05, a Visual and Environmental Studies Concentrator in Dudley House, and Coll, a Social Anthropology concentrator in Leverett House, are the chief planners of Present!’s next happening. The event’s focus will be the construction of a gigantic cloth box.

“We need to think about texture and weight,” said Coll, surrounded by brightly colored cloth in a Sew-Low fabric supply shop. “There’s a bright yellow...No, that would look like a fluorescent McDonald’s....” Coll and Mahfouda peruse the rolls of cloth until they find a suitably shocking turquoise to match the cheerful red fabric they have already carefully selected.

“We want to build a ten-foot by ten-foot cube out of fabric,” Mahfouda said. “The plan is to have everyone parade the cube through some space in the Yard, then get inside the cube and have lunch. We don’t know how many people will show up…We don’t even know if we’ll remember to bring food,” said a grinning Mahfouda. “It’s completely spur-of-the-moment.”

HOW HAPPENINGS CAME TO BE

Spontaneous though the happenings of today may be, the events are actually part of a formal tradition of public art that extends back to an October evening in 1959, when Allan Kaprow debuted his 18 Happenings in 6 Parts at New York’s Reuben Gallery. According to RoseLee Goldberg in Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, Kaprow built three small rooms in a loft, filled them with chairs, and herded the audience from room to room showing them disjointed actions like a woman standing still “for ten seconds, left forearm raised, pointing to the floor” or two “performers reciting monosyllabic words.” Kaprow thought that the audience’s presence, interactions, or observations completed his pieces. From then on, a “happening” has referred to a work of performing art that requires others’ participation.

Cambridge itself has a history of happening-like events as old as 237 years ago, according to Catherine A. Siller ’06. In an e-mail promoting the Arts Collective Halloween event, she cited Brown’s 1893 “History of Cambridge,” saying, “On Halloween 1767, Cambridge witnessed the ghastly Vespers Massacre at what is now Winthrop Park (on JFK St.) in which an ‘impromptue human sculpeture, each component dressed in elaborate costumery’ was killed by a mad, axe-wielding man.” The artwork was the product of “a number of Cambridge’s artistic and literary rebels who had come to … place ‘newe formef of arte in the publick optick!’”

This history of art as political and social expression is particularly relevant to the role of the Arts Collective in happenings. Its attachment to the Harvard Social Forum provides an outlet for members of the Harvard community to communicate their thoughts on significant issues creatively. In seeking to provide such a channel, the Arts Collective identifies with its social-justice roots.

Present!, an organization of intrepid upperclassmen now in its sophomore year, focuses more intensely on happenings. The group describes itself as “devoted to sharing, exploring and enjoying the visible and hidden, the now and the future and the impossible, the spontaneous and the momentary, from many sides....” Present! also publishes a creative literary magazine and takes part in other events that are more formal and structured.

Present! found its birth at the Manifesto Party last October in Adams House’s Kronauer Space, when the founding members gathered together to write and make proclamations of their personal and artistic ideas. “It was really exciting to hear my friends’ formal writing in an informal setting,” said Coll, one of the group’s major organizers.

More recently, Present! hosted a “Letter-Writing Campaign” outside the Science Center over Freshman Parents’ Weekend. The organization supplied typewriters, paper, and stamps; students supplied their own thoughts and messages. The group sealed, addressed, and mailed each piece of correspondence; students needed only bring something to say. The response was overwhelmingly positive from passersby, who readily unveiled unknown passions for letter-writing as well as the characteristic college student’s love of mail.

While happenings may seem whimsical in their spontaneity, the students who organize the productions consider their art substantial. Organizers in Present! often invest considerable amounts of their own time, money, and energy into producing a display like Mahfouda’s cube. They are invested in the whole process of a happening, facilitating its evolution from one person’s idea to a campus-wide event.

HAPPENINGS WITHIN AN INSTITUTION

However, some members of the Harvard arts community find the idea of “public art” unappealing and even repugnant, lacking a loyalty to the ideal spirit of art. Professor Stephen Prina, a member of the Visual and Environmental Studies department, renounces the principles that underlie more formal public art displays.

“Usually, by public art we mean subsidized large projects, requiring confirmation from an institution or advisory board,” he said. “That mainly serves to reinforce normative values in art. It’s a product of consensus culture.”

Prina thus suggests that the public’s tendency to prize the more prosaic elements of art often constrain other forms of creativity. For the groups who organize happenings, his comments underscore the necessity that their events remain spontaneous and work free of college bureaucracy. However, the defiant nature of the work—working in public space without the direct consent of College officials—leads to conflict with the Arts Collective’s, Present!’s and other groups’ use of University resources.

One group works within the structure of the University administration to bring art to developing countries. Using institutional grants, one Leverite has brought public art to Mussorie, India: Amar C. Bakshi ’05 is the founder and leader of Aina Arts, an organization devoted to the promotion of art in developing countries. “We see art not as a luxury, but as a necessity, and seek to provide its benefits in places where it is not encouraged,” said Bakshi.

The key concept behind Aina Arts is its method of operations: Bakshi’s organization works with a group of children for several weeks, observing the ways in which the group could supplement the students’ everyday lives with art. He said, “We looked for the use of arts in religious practices, in daily practices, in special ceremonies and celebrations striving to see art in its broadest conception.” Then the group teaches the children to see the same beauty and art that they have observed. According to Bakshi, “Our goal was never to be a technical school, but rather a place in which the children could address dilemmas within their culture using the tools arts gives them.”

In their work showing the children of India how to find art in the everyday, the participants of Aina Arts derive a greater understanding of the role of public art themselves. “We seek to show students here [at Harvard] the ways in which art-making takes place outside the gallery walls of New York or show-rooms in London, in the lives of millions of people,” commented Bakshi, who is expanding the organization’s frontiers from Mussoorie to an AIDS orphanage in Zimbabwe and eventually locations in Latin America.

Of public works of art in general, Bakshi said, “I think all art must be public and socially engaged. The arts are primarily a means of communication between individuals and communities, and I feel that for years art has been systematically divorced from daily life in an effort to enshrine its products and ignore the essence of its process.”

The intrepid artists of Harvard are constantly looking towards the future. “We’re hoping to have a Silent Dance at the Harvard-Yale game,” Mahfouda said enthusiastically. “We’re hoping to get a lot of small radios and headphones—WHRB [Harvard’s radio show] will be involved—and have everyone tune in to the show and dance. That way there’s no noise, but the music’s everywhere.”

“It’s really about people being involved in one thing,” Mahfouda said of happenings and public art in general. “They’re united in one purpose.” Present!’s self-description speaks to this unity, saying, “We’re devoted to letting the world speak, and talking back too.”