Alan Kaprow

In 1958, Kaprow published the essay "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock". In it, he uses the term "happening" for the first time stating that craftsmanship and permanence should be forgotten and perishable materials should be used in art. Apparently Kaprow wasn't trying to be clever, he was just repsonding to current cultural trends - "What's happening man?" Kaprow was tired of the rules and structures and disconnect between art and every-day life. Kaprow wanted to make work in which intermedia performances involving groups of participants—which came to be known as “Happenings”—became a new art form. By 1959 Kaprow was exploring a direction in art where idea and process were considered more important than the object.

“I am convinced that painting is a bore. So is music and literature. What doesn’t bore me is the total destruction of ideas that have any discipline. Instead of painting, move your arms; instead of music, make noise. I’m giving up painting and all the arts by doing everything and anything.”

“The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” published in the October 1958 issue of Art News, Allan predicted that in the future he and like-minded artists would “become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of everyday life…Not satisfied with the suggestion through paint of our other senses, we shall utilize the specific substances of sight, sound, movements, people, odors, touch. [We shall show] as if for the first time, the world we have always had about us, but ignored.”

the purpose of these works, like “that of any art [is] to come to grips with the world, to do something revelatory which in turn could make things about us more meaningful…This, I think, is central to the best art, no matter what else it may superficially be about.” - Allen Kaprow, "First Nam June Paik. Now Allan Kaprow. Two great innovators, gone." by Irving Sandler

"Well, you know, a lot of work nowadays tends to be illustrative of theory already written, and some of it tends to be quite consciously didactic, as if the determination is to teach somebody something. And letting that go for the moment, as far as its value is concerned, it’s exactly the opposite of what I seem to find most useful, and that is to leave things open and not determine anything except the very clear form. The form is always very simple and clear. What is experienced is uncertain and unforeseeable, which is why I do it, and its point is never clear to me, even after I’ve done it. So that’s a very, very different way of looking at the nature of our responsibility in the world." - Kaprow, JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ART

Interestingly, by the late Sixties, his work had indirectly spurred various countercultural phenomena—such as the “be-ins” and “love-ins”—as well as the massive outdoor rock festivals of that era. This kind of popularization was not particularly welcomed by Kaprow, who believed his ideas were being distorted by the commercial media and, at a certain point, refused to allow journalists and press photographers admittance to his events. - "Allan Kaprow, the Happener", by Robert C. Morgan

Here's a great interview excerpt that sums up Kaprow's work-

"Morgan: When you talk about the absurd, or when I sense the absurd in your works, I don’t see your meaning of the absurd as an existential dilemma, but as another kind of absurd that is more within the process of daily life, the pragmatics of how we actually see reality or ourselves.

Kaprow: Let me give you an example. You’re waiting at a bus stop along with a few other people. You wait for a half hour. The bus comes along and you get on. The fare is a dollar fifty, and you reach into your pocket and you find a dollar and forty-five cents. You say to the driver, “I only have a dollar forty-five. Will you cash a twenty dollar bill?” He says, “We don’t cash twenty dollar bills,” and points to the sign on the coin box. And you have to get off. Now this is a typical example of what happens every day in our lives. And we often complain about these things: Why is the world this way? But what’s evident to me is that ninety-nine percent of the world is that way and there is no possible way to change that. Maybe there’s no need to change it, even though the more earnest of us and the world’s leaders keep talking about control and making things come out the way they want them or they think they ought to be. So it’s an attitude toward the world that is perhaps more permissive, a little bit more humorous, more gently ironical, more accepting, even though there is the apparent magnitude of suffering. Some will find this position of mine privileged, indifferent, but, in my point of view, this is the only route toward compassion, whereas insisting on fixing the world, as we see so far, is not successful. We haven’t prevented street people from being street people, or stopping the war in the gulf by the moralisms that abound today. So it’s a different way of looking at the kind of life we have." - Kaprow, JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ART

also, this:

"Foolishness… [My art] has no consequence, no value… i just like to do it."