4 From Object to Event: Performance Art

While Rauschenberg’s interactive works are perfect examples of how audience participation can be realized with physically tangible pieces, action art calls the object-based work itself into question. Allan Kaprow and George Brecht created happenings and events with extremely open choreographies that involved the audience in a variety of ways and also incorporated multimedia elements. Even if in their case there was no technically induced causal interplay between visual and acoustic elements, the visitors often created both: for example in Brecht’s event score Motor Vehicle Sundown, a group of volunteers were asked to sit into their parked cars and follow a predetermined score inviting them to turn on and off various headlights, acoustic signals, and the car engine, and to operate mechanical equipment such as windscreen wipers and windows.^[8]