Milena Tomic

OCAD University, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences and School of Interdis. Studies, Faculty Member

University College London, History of Art, Alumna

McGill University, Art History & Communication Studies, Post-Doc

University of Toronto, Department of Visual Studies, Instructor

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Refereed Articles by Milena Tomic

"Reinvention as Parallax: Allegorical and Other Afterlives of Allan Kaprow’s Un-Art," Word & Image, vol 33, no. 2 (2017): 109-126

Word & Image, 2017

Allan Kaprow conceived of his score-based “un-art” as unrepeatable yet open to reinvention: his H... more Allan Kaprow conceived of his score-based “un-art” as unrepeatable yet open to reinvention: his Happenings, Environments, and Activities had to be radically reimagined, not reenacted on a stage set or reconstructed from photographs. Shortly before his death in 2006, Kaprow assembled visual and verbal information connected to his key works, but provided artists, curators, and scholars with few rules about how to approach them. Generally speaking, the reinventor’s task is to produce difference through fidelity to whatever is so essential in the work that it can survive its dramatic transformation. While some understood this as careful attention to a work’s central metaphor, others took a more literalist approach, reenacting the largely verbal scores to the letter; still others combined the two approaches, exploiting the productive tension—or parallax shift—between a work’s literal and figurative elements. Through this notion of a parallax shift that brackets out certain elements to produce various meanings, this article explores different iterations of 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959), Yard (1961), Baggage (1972), and Easy (1972). Filled with the same productive contradictions as his writing, Kaprow’s un-art here emerges through the interventions of André Lepecki, Otobong Nkanga, William Pope.L, Sharon Hayes, and Florian Dombois as central to the ongoing historicizing of live art.

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