FINDING MEANING IN HAPPENINGS

When reading Susan Sontag's essay on "Happenings" I found myself questioning the meaning of them. Are they expressive art displays, theatrical productions, installations....a little bit of it all? She says " Happenings have no plot, though it is an action or a series of actions and events. It also shuns continuous rational discourse, though it may contain words like Help!, Voglio un bichiere di acqua, Love me, Car, One, two , three.... Speech is purified and condensed by dispareteness(there is only speech of need) and then expanded by ineffectuality, by the lack of relation between the persons enacting the Happening." By performing these Happenings I want to know what kind of reactions they wanted to achieve with each individual Happening since they were always rehearsed. By being rehearsed they had to have some sort of theme in mind when performing rather just just making random sounds and actions with objects. It seems like they wanted to portray " a something of some sort" to the audience in a challenging, thought producing way. I find it coincidental that a student of John Cage ( a composer known to incorporate the sounds of the concert hall before a show-like mumbling, coughing, clacking-as his opening piece) would be involved in this sort of thing because it has a lot of the same mode of thing as John Cage had with his work. The idea that the sounds of nothing could actually be something related to the idea of no plot as the plot. This also reminds me of the " This Is Not A Pipe" piece by Rene Magritte which works well because these Happenings were said to be very "dreamlike and surrealist." Sontag states, " the Surrealist sensibility aims to shock through the techniques of radical juxtaposition. Even one of the classical methods of psychoanalysis, free association, can be interpreted as another working-out of the Surrealist principle of radical juxtaposition."