Alison Knowles, a leading artist of the Fluxus movement in the 1960s and the make salad (1962) died in New York on October 29 at the age of 92. Her New York gallery, James Fuentes, announced her death but did not specify the cause.
Many of Knowles’ sculptures, performances, and musical works are so simple that anyone could make them, and that was their point. Using everyday materials such as dried beans, shells, netting and tuna, Knowles transforms everyday life into art, showing that anyone can be an artist if they put their mind to it.
make saladHer best-known works are rooted in what are commonly called event scores, or text-based instructions that can be enacted by readers. In this case, the score consists only of its title, with no instructions on which ingredients to use and which steps to take. In abandoning recipes or even precise instructions, Knowles lets her performers complete the work knowing that many versions will likely result.
In fact, this has already happened: make salad From Art Basel in Switzerland to the Tate Modern in London, where Knowles himself has been invited to leaf through a giant salad of chopped vegetables. However make saladAs with many of Knowles’ finest racing scores, there is no need to consume (eat or see) them in a museum. It can also be done easily at home.
make salad Symbolizing the openness of Knowles’ work. She noted that the original iteration, which was staged at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1962, began when she informally proposed doing something with food, leading her then-husband, artist Dick Higgins, to ask her to make a salad. But behind its whimsy lies something more serious.
“I’m a married woman with two kids,” Knowles told art news In 2016, she conducted a survey at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “[Salad] It was something I loved and knew how to cook…I knew I could do things on stage that men couldn’t. “
Works such as this established Knowles as one of the leading artists of the Fluxus movement, which formally took shape in 1963 when George Maciunas published a manifesto encouraging readers to “Clear The world of death art, imitation, artificial art, abstract art, illusion art, mathematical art——Cleansing the world of “Europeanism”! ” The movement emphasized performance and the use of accessible materials and also included Yoko Ono, George Brecht and other notable figures.
Knowles also created an iconic Fluxus work this same luncha piece from the late 1960s whose event score asks readers to eat the same lunch ad infinitum. The score lists “Tuna Sandwich on Wheat Toast, with lettuce and butter, no mayonnaise, and a large glass of buttermilk or a cup of soup” – Knowles himself ate many lunches at a New York diner before imagining the piece.
Knowles invited artists Shigeko Kubota, Ay-O and other friends to perform same lunch and documented their experiences through photography. But the beauty of this piece is that the activity it requires is so banal that anyone could accidentally perform it without noticing.
Knowles told the outlet that the article was “an excuse to talk to people, pay attention to what’s going on, and pay attention.” new york times In 2011, the Museum of Modern Art reproduced the work.
Alison Knowles was born in Scarsdale, New York, in 1933. As an undergraduate, she attended Middlebury College in Vermont, where she realized she was different from other women of her generation. “When I was rejected from my sorority at Middlebury College, I realized there were other ways out for me, away from the young women there who were heading toward sororities and boyfriends,” she told me art news.
Knowles then began working as a painter, studying the medium of painting at the Pratt Institute in New York. She was taught early on by Josef Albers and Adolph Gottlieb. She ended up destroying the paintings she had created under their guidance.
While in New York in the late 1950s, Knowles was able to see up close some of the most experimental art of the time. She experienced Allan Kaprow’s Happenings, which required bizarre performance poses in an installation-like environment, and became friendly with dancer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage, with whom she went mushroom hunting.
Knowles went on to perform at an event in 1962 now known as the First Fluxus Concert. The concert took place in Wiesbaden, Germany, before an audience unaccustomed to this type of performance work. Some people simply get up and leave. “As a performer, I learned very quickly to keep doing what I was doing no matter what,” she told the outlet Brooklyn Railroad 2001.
knowles told rail The soundtracks for her events were “more poetic than anything else”, and indeed she also wrote poetry and experimental works, some of which were published by Something Else Press, which was co-run by Higgins, who was married to Higgins from 1960 to 1970. (They had twin daughters, Hannah and Jessica, whom Knowles once described as “my sisters and my children.”) Through the publishing house, Knowles collaborated with Cage symbolin which a select group of participants are given a set of 64 pre-selected words to make their own compositions, with the number referring to the number of hexagrams. I Ching.
She is also credited with writing some of the first computer-generated poetry. One of her most famous works, House of Dust (1967), was written with James Tenney using the FORTRAN programming language. The poem describes a house, the people who use it and the materials they hold, which are reassembled by computers. “For me, exploring new media has always been a collaborative effort; it involves working with different people and the different materials and means we choose,” she told art forum The poem will soon be on display at New York’s New Museum.
In the late sixties and beyond, Knowles also created sculptural installations. Among the most praised, ship bookproduced in 1967, was remade between 2014 and 2015 after the original was destroyed. It features a net, a porthole-like hole and a fishing rod in homage to her brother, a fisherman who lived on Long Island.
Working with composer Joshua Selman, who helped organize her archives during the later stages of her career, Knowles also composed the following musical compositions: string bean canyon (1992), featuring the sounds of the New Mexico landscape.
Knowles is one of the few artists of note, though she never quite achieved the institutional bona fide that many artists of her stature achieve. Her resume does not list participation in the Venice Biennale, Documenta, or even the Whitney Biennial. It was not until 2022 that the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive hosted her first comprehensive retrospective. In 2024 the show traveled to Wiesbaden where the first Fluxus concert took place.
Still, Knowles seemed pleased with the number of collaborators he had amassed during his lifetime. “I hope my work will broaden participation,” she told new york times 2022. “I don’t want people to passively look at my work, but to actively participate by touching it, eating something, following directions to listen, making or taking something themselves, or participating in an activity.”
