Calling.

New York.: Something Else Press., 1967. Wooden board front cover, with text by Dick Higgins and justification statement printed on front; rear cover is sheet of white acrylic plexi. All sheets loose as issued, and bound together with the original belt strap wraparound.. (50.8 x 60.4 cm).. With five colourless clear acrylic sheets on which several words are printed, each in a different colur (red, brown, yellow, turquoise, and silver). Allan Kaprow’s kidnap-scenario happening Calling was first performed in 1965. Participants, many of them artists and friends of Kaprow, were assigned roles in the scenario. On Saturday, August 21, 1965, three participants were picked up from a roadside in New York, wrapped in aluminium foil and driven to a public parking meter. The drivers of the cars were replaced and the packaged participants were unwrapped from the foil and rewrapped in laundry bags. They were picked up by a second car, driven to New York’s Grand Central Station and abandoned, propped up against the information booth there. The three wrapped participants then began to call out one another’s names while freeing themselves from their laundry bags. Once free, they went to a public telephone booth to call one of the other participants in the Happening. The person on the other end of the phone answered but remained silent. The second day of the Happening took place in the woods of George Segal’s farm and enacted a different version of the kidnap scenario. Two years after the performance of Calling, under the auspices of Dick Higgins and his Something Else Press, Kaprow’s work was to be transformed into a colourful, playful, almost visually poetic work. The process behind the production of the Calling portfolio, published in 1967, is best described by Dick Higgins’s comments which are printed on the verso of the portfolio’s plywood cover: ""Calling, a Happening by Allan Kaprow performed in and out of New York in the summer of 1965, is one of the landmarks of the form, and its scenario typifies the poetic rictual style he has developed. This present graphic representation, however, began as an improvision when Kaprow, playing with a set of rubber stamp letters, stamped out each word of the scenario on a separate index card. I continued the game by assembling the cards on the copyboard of a graphic arts camera and shooting them by adding an element of color play. The resulting object is not, however, a final one in any sense. While the original scenario may be read by starting from bottom to top, right hand column to left hand, on the silver, blue, red, yellow, and, finally, brown sheets, there are other stories which the reader is invited to tell, other games for him to play.” The deluxe masterpiece of the Something Else Press, Allan Kaprow’s Calling was published in an edition of only 25 copies, stamp-numbered on the front, and brush-signed in black paint by Kaprow on verso of front board. [Ref. Rolf Dittmar - The Book of the Art of Artists’ Books - Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, 1978 - p. 136].