Pollock Influences

After seeing an exhibition of Pollock's work Allan Kaprow found the inspiration for his own experiments in the total, enveloping environment they created. Pollock also had a major influence on Kaprow in terms of spatial expressionism. Kaprow made it very clear that his works were related to art and not the theater. He stressed his happenings were not in the same category as scripted scenes involving actors playing parts but as action paintings of the Abstract Expressionists. Kaprow's pieces involve spaces in which he has physically altered, with sights and sounds just as deliberately composed as any canvas by Pollock. He believed Pollock was more important for his choreographic approach to painting that his initiated rather then his paintings as material objects.

Kaprow developed an "action-collage" technique in which he employed such materials as straw, wadded newspaper, twine and flashing lights, this led him to explore a concept now known as “Happenings” which at the time was a new art form. Kaprow wrote an essay “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” in which he discusses influences of Pollok’s work on his own as an artist. In this essay he insisted that the way that art was made had been changed. He thought it should include things from everyday life that we don’t normally associate with art. In reference to Pollock’s works he stated, "they ceased to become paintings and became environments", paving the way for a new form of art in which "action" predominated over "painting". The work of Pollock, the apotheosis of an art of action, provided Kaprow with a rationale to progress beyond traditional