The Construction of Boston



A graduate student from Amsterdam emailed me with a request for Allan Kaprow's review of Kenneth Koch's The Construction of Boston. A portion of his review was published in Floating Bear #30. The handwritten draft of the essay is in the Kaprow archive at the Getty.


I post it here as an example of the mimeo mag as critical journal. You think of mimeo as a vehicle for poetry but the medium also provides access to some of the most up-to-the-minute criticism and accounts of contemporary poetry, art, theater, literature and architecture that is available. Much of it I would suspect has slipped through the cracks of the various anthologies, collecteds and selecteds.


Here is the Scott Wheeler's setting of the Happening (initially performed for one night at the Maidman Theatre on 42nd Street in New York City in 1962) to music and Koch's libretto for context:






JB

1 comments:

Chick Purchase said...

Kaprow is ruthless! Although I am not aware of any recordings of the event, the text itself is more than worth reading. One of many pieces Koch wrote about the construction of cities (Angelica, my favorite, features a singing and dancing Baron Haussmann). The other ‘cooks at the pot’ were Jean Tinguely (architecture), Robert Rauschenberg (people and weather), and Niki de St. Phalle (beauty and art). The producer was Merce Cunningham.

Thanks again for uploading these pages - the mystery of TCOB will slowly be unraveled...

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