Alison Knowles (born 1933) is an American visual artist known for her installations, performances, soundworks, and publications. Knowles was a founding member of the Fluxus movement, an international network of artists who aspired to merge different artistic media and disciplines. Criteria that have come to distinguish her work as an artist are the arena of performance, the indeterminacy of her event scores resulting in the deauthorization of the work, and the element of tactile participation. She graduated from Pratt Institute in New York with an honors degree in fine art. In May 2015, she was awarded an honorary doctorate degree by Pratt.
In the 1960s, she was an active participant in New York City's downtown art scene, collaborating with influential artists such as John Cage and Marcel Duchamp. During this time she began producing event scores, or performances that rework the everyday into art. Knowles's inclusion of visual, aural, and tactile elements sets her art apart from the work of other Fluxus artists.
From July 20, 2022 to February 12, 2023, Knowles was the subject of by Alison Knowles: A Retrospective (1960–2022) at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
In addition to her father, Knowles notes John Cage as another one of her mentors. She knew of Cage through one of his courses taught at the New School for Social Research in 1958. Many of the Fluxus leaders, such as Dick Higgins, George Brecht, Al Hansen and Allan Kaprow, took the historic class. Knowles's focus in painting diminished after her show at the Nonegon Gallery in New York, in which she destroyed all of her works in a bonfire behind her brother's house. This act of destruction led directly to her association with other types of work and eventually with Fluxus. On the first Fluxus tour in 1962, Knowles began to write event scores, which would quickly become a major aspect of the movement.
After participating in the initial Fluxus Festivals in Europe from 1962 to 1963, Knowles returned to the United States and began making objects, some as Fluxus multiples commissioned by George Maciunas, the leader of the movement. Knowles's object-based pieces focus on the audience's tactile and audible interaction with the artwork. While her counterparts targeted the conventions of music, Knowles focused on poetry and the significance of spoken word. During the 1960s, she began to incorporate beans in her art, a common motif in her work. The bean was a unique object to use at a time when other Fluxus artists employed street detritus, Found objects, and assemblage objects.
In 1967, Knowles created The House of Dust, perhaps the most widely known example of computer-generated digital poetry, in collaboration with composer James Tenney. The poem began as a set of four lists written by Knowles. Selecting a phrase from each list would describe a house made of a certain material, in a particular location, illuminated by a light source, and sheltering various inhabitants." A House of Dust (1967) and Letters to Gertrude Stein (1968)" In Wannamaker, Robert, The Music of James Tenney, Volume 2: A Handbook to the Pieces (University of Illinois Press, 2021), 60-66. She gave the lists to Tenney, who generated the printed poetry using the FORTRAN programming language on an early IBM computer. The poem was included in the exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity. Sutton, Gloria. "Stan VanDerBeek’s Poemfields: The Interstice of Cinema and Computing." In Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts, edited by Hannah Higgins and Douglas Kahn (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 330. The output yielded a permutation sequenced by chance. From roughly 10,000 possible stanzas, Knowles selected one quatrain—“a house of dust / on open ground / lit by natural light / inhabited by friends and enemies”—as the basis for an interactive sculpture on the California Institute of the Arts campus in the early 1970s.
Knowles expanded the scale of her book projects with The Big Book (1967), a walk-in construction composed of eight moveable “pages,” each four feet wide by eight feet tall, anchored to a metal spine. Each page featured an access point leading to the next, forming different spaces and ways the reader could approach the book. The composition weighed about a ton, and contained a gallery, library, grass tunnel, and window. It was built using found materials such as a toilet, stove, and telephone from her apartment and studio, and could be packaged and shipped in two crates. The book traveled to cities in Canada, Europe, and the United States, gradually disintegrating into its individual components by the time it reached its final destination in San Diego, California. The Big Book inspired her other large-scale installations, The Book of Bean and The Boat Book. In addition to exploring the sculptural potential of a book, Knowles has also produced and written several books of experimental text and poetry.
The Boat Book premiered at Art Basel in Miami in January 2014. Knowles said, "The grass tunnel will be replaced by a hoop structure between two pages covered with blue silk like the ocean." The "book sculpture," as she refers to it, also contains a porthole, fishing nets and a fishing pole, an anchor, and other accoutrements of water travel.
The aspect of touch is a distinct element that sets Knowles apart from many other Fluxus artists. One of her most notable event scores, Make a Salad, was originally performed in 1962 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. In this score, Knowles prepares a massive salad by chopping the vegetables to the beat of live music, mixing the ingredients by tossing it in the air, then serving the salad to the audience. Make a Salad has been performed at numerous venues around the world, including the Tate Modern, the High Line, the Walker Art Center, and most recently at Art Basel 2016.
Shoes of Your Choice also debuted at the same time as Make a Salad at the ICA. For Shoes of Your Choice, Knowles asks the participants to simply describe the shoes they are wearing. In 2011, Knowles performed Shoes of Your ChoiceArchived at Ghostarchive and the
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> Wayback Machine: and other works for President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama in "A Celebration of American Poetry at the White House" alongside Billy Collins, the hip-hop actor and poet Common, Elizabeth Alexander, Rita Dove and Kenneth Goldsmith.
In the late 1960s, Knowles worked closely with Marcel Duchamp to recreate his first optical piece, the Coeurs Volants. The original was made in 1936 for the Cahiers d'Art, a French artistic and literary journal. Initially, Knowles wanted the rights to reproduce the image for the cover of a Something Else Press publication (featuring Emmett Williams's concrete poem Sweethearts). However, upon meeting in person, it was decided that she would create a new silkscreen of the work. Knowles visited the apartment of Marcel and Teeny Duchamp to choose color samples for the reprint. After a miscommunication, Duchamp jokingly signed one of the swatches in pencil, arguably creating his last readymade.
Knowles lives and works from her loft in New York City's Soho district, where she was a resident beginning in the 1950s.
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