Happiness Happenings

Happiness Happenings  A Collaboration between Oriana Fox, Davina Drummond and the Hayward Huddle  Royal Festival Hall, SouthBank Centre  Saturday 27th & Sunday 28th November, 12-4pm  

Allan Kaprow’s happenings make us question how our every day tasks and gestures make us feel and think. Artist Oriana Fox is collaborating with Davina Drummond and the Hayward Huddle, the gallery’s group of 16-19 year olds, to create a series of large and small scale ‘Happiness Happenings’ that will take Kaprow’s work one step further. Day-to-day activities will be re-examined and re-performed not only to take us out of step with the everyday, but hopefully to bring us a little closer to joy.  

 

 Oriana, Davina and the Hayward Huddle set themselves the task of re-imagining Kaprow’s works as self-help exercises. The participatory installations and performances that make up ‘Happiness Happenings’ therefore take Allan Kaprow’s scores as their starting point, however our goal is to help participants both to find and define what makes them happy. Some of the pieces immediately lent themselves to this re-interpretation. For example, Take A Shoe For a Walk (1989) is almost identical to psychologist Albert Ellis’ recommended treatment for overcoming fear of public humiliation, except that that shoe is replaced by a banana. Likewise, Satisfaction (1976), which was originally written to enable a pair of lovers to demonstrate how to meet one another’s needs, can and will be easily re-contextualised towards therapeutic ends. Furthermore, Time Pieces (1973), Kaprow’s detailed instructions for keeping track of your heart-rate and breath, will be used to observe which activities make your pulse race faster, whether they entail revealing intimate feelings to strangers or taking part in a high-impact aerobics routine. No matter what, these are all timely pursuits in light of the government’s plan to carry out a happiness poll; perhaps they will employ a few of these tactics to measure and then increase the UK’s gross national happiness!    

Come along and indulge yourself in our Happiness Happenings. You are guaranteed to be simultaneously perplexed and elated by the paradoxes inherent in following someone else’s instructions for how to be truly and gleefully yourself. Feast on guilty pleasures and then over-analyse your motivations for doing so. Learn how to take a compliment and then discover that the greatest pleasure may lie in delivering one. Locate your inner-therapist by giving the advice you would most like to receive. Do some soul-searching and then some calorie-burning. Compare an endorphin rush with a sugar-high. Perhaps most importantly, take pleasure in fulfilling one of Kaprow’s most treasured aims – to blur the boundary between art and life.

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