« Happenings and Other Acts » collects seminal essays, interviews, and performance texts by and about Happenings and Fluxus artists. The anthology reprints, in its entirety, the 1965 Happenings issue of « The Drama Review » (TDR), which was co-edited by Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner, supplemented by articles from subsequent TDR numbers, Kirby’s introduction to his own « Happenings anthology », excerpts from Allan Kaprow’s « Assemblages, Environments & Happenings »; sections from Carolee Schneemann’s « More Than Meat Joy »; and the concluding essay, written for this volume by Günter Berghaus, which offers the first overview of European Happenings written in English.

Published at the height of the Happenings and Fluxus movements, these are invaluable documents from a period that radically changed our perception of the function of the artist, the role of the observer, and the relation between art and everyday life. All boundaries of conventional art genres were broken by artists such as John Cage, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Anna Halprin, Ken Dewey, George Maciunas, Alison Knowles, Jackson Mac Low, La Monte Young, Yvonne Rainer, Dick Higgins, Jean-Jacques Lebel, and Carolee Schneemann.