Allan Kaprow's 'happenings' and 'environments' were the precursors to contemporary performance art, and his essays are some of the most thoughtful, provocative, and influential of his generation. His sustained inquiry into the paradoxical relationship of art to life and into the nature of meaning itself is brought into focus in this newly expanded collection of his most significant writings. A new preface and two new additional essays published in the 1990s bring this valuable collection up to date.

"Throughout these essays there is a lyric impulse, a rising of the heart, a moral passion that represents the spirit of the 60s at its best. At the same time Kaprow's thinking is exceedingly rigorous. . . . He has the optimism of the period without its willed naïveté." - Art in America