LOS ANGELES.-The Los Angeles County Museum of Art will open the exhibit Fluids: A Happening by Allan Kaprow starting on April 25 and running through April 27. During three days, rectangular enclosures of ice blocks are built throughout the city. Their walls are unbroken. They are left to melt.

One of Kaprow’s most ambitious Happenings, Fluids was first realized for his 1967 retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum when teams of volunteers built thirteen rectangular structures made of ice blocks over three days throughout the city. LACMA will organize the reinvention of Fluids at a wide range of sites across Los Angeles, including some of Kaprow’s original locations. Teams of volunteers, students, and others will build the ice structures, which take up to a day to complete and last for approximately three days.

Avant-garde artist and theorist, born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, USA. He studied art under the influential painter and theorist Hans Hofmann, and music under John Cage. Rejecting such traditional values as craftsmanship and permanence, he instead promoted ‘happenings’, involving spectator participation, and welcoming unplanned developments. His first such work, ‘Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts’, took place in 1959 at the Reuben Gallery in Manhattan, which he had co-founded. It involved spectators moving, on cue, to different parts of the gallery to witness artists painting, a woman squeezing oranges, and a concert performed on toy instruments.