This bi-week, we'll look at post-modern art. The below excerpt, by using three specific examples, describes a type of performance art - called a `Happening' - that was popular in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Whilst ['Happenings' and Fluxus] shared a desire to reconfigure artist-audience relations through disorienting transgressions of media boundaries, the tendencies differed fundamentally. 'Happenings' such as Kaprow's seminal 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959) were put on in New York by visually trained artists whose experimentalism was tied to the promotional concerns of specific venues, notably the Judson Memorial Church, with its pioneering rapprochement between religion and modern art, and the Reuben Gallery, where 18 Happenings took place. `Happenings' therefore took the form of complex sensory environments, bordering on theatre in terms of vestigial narrative content and the use of 'props', but soliciting spectator participation. Jim Dine's Car Crash, a response to a spate of car accidents in which friends had died, reactivated trauma via a barrage of poetically allusive actions, images, and sounds.

Source: After Modern Art 1945-2000 by David Hopkins