Fluids
Art Form: Installation Art
Fluids is one of Kaprow's most ambitious works. In it, he recruited groups of local residents to build huge ice structures in various locations in Pasadena, CA during a mid career retrospective. The original "score" for the piece was displayed on billboards around the city. The idea of collective action resulting in the inevitable melting of the ice was a comment on the obsolete nature of human labor - a "dystopian allegory of capitalist production and consumption," refuting the permanence of the art object. Documentation of the event includes photographs, film, the billboard score, the artist's notes and drawings, letters and press clippings. This seminal work was reinvented in 2005 and as Overflow by the LA Art Girls in 2008 as part of Allan Kaprow - Art as Life posthumous retrospective at the Geffen Contemporary's space in LA MOCA.
