Happenings has multiple meanings (besides the straightforward dictionary definition):
The Happenings were a 1960s pop music group whose major hits were "See You In September" and a cover of "I Got Rhythm" updated for the nascent pop/rock era.
In the art world, Happenings are performances, events, or situations meant to be considered as art.
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Happenings could take place anywhere, were often multi-disciplinary, often lacked a narrative and frequently sought to involve the audience in some way.
Kaprow’s piece 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959) is commonly cited as the first happening, although the first happening is sometimes considered to have been a 1952 performance of Theater Piece No. 1 at Black Mountain College by John Cage, who was a teacher of Kaprow in the mid-1950s.
The only way to avoid a Happening, is to prevent it by saying "no way" and showing your index finger in an horizontal position to a person when you suspect he's going to perform a Happening on you in the upcoming minutes.
Happenings are notoriously difficult to describe, in part because each was a unique event shaped by the actions of the audience that participated on any given performance.
Simply put, Happenings, such as Household from 1964, were held in physical environments – loft spaces, abandoned factories, buses, parks, etc. – and brought people, objects, and events in surprising juxtaposition to one another.
The Happening was a constellation of events that could be distributed across once arbitrary temporal and spatial boundaries.
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