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action was isolated [in the U.S.] and easy to get into as a philosophy of democracy for the Europeans, strangely enough. It should have been here, but it wasn’t.” 19 There was no explicit political content in the Environments of Kaprow, Oldenburg, and Dine. Kaprow vividly recalls that the postMcCarthy era was one in which many artists were afraid to make any explicit political statements. At Rutgers University, where Kaprow taught art history, and where several faculty members had been dismissed during the McCarthy era, Kaprow had been told that he was expected to make no waves.20 The political implications of Kaprow’s Environments were subtle. They hinged on his use of spectator participation, which was consistent with the notion of participatory democracy. This idea existed in spirit years before it was named in the Port Huron statement of 1962. It has applications for the artistic community as well as for the countercultural movements spawned by the civil rights movement. Works involving direct involvement for the visitor, produced at cooperative or community-run exhibition spaces, must be understood in this context.21 In discussing the notion of participation in the Environments by Kaprow, Oldenburg, and Dine, one must be careful to separate the critical rhetoric from the reality of the artists’ intentions.The critical response to Environments, which depended almost solely on Kaprow, put a misleading emphasis on spectator participation in Environments, giving the impression that it was a primary goal for all concerned. For example, in a group show in which all three artists participated, one reviewer announced:“The young avant-gardes now showing at the Martha Jackson and adjoining David Andersen galleries in New York . . . intend to make every viewer an active, func-
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