Alison Knowles, a number one artist of the Fluxus motion of the Sixties and the mind behind such beloved items as Make a Salad (1962), died at 92 in New York on October 29. Her gallery, the New York–based mostly James Fuentes, introduced her passing however didn’t specify a trigger.
A lot of Knowles’s sculptures, performances, and musical works have been so easy that anybody may produce them, which was precisely their level. Utilizing supplies as quotidian as dried beans, shells, netting, and tunafish, Knowles remodeled the on a regular basis into artwork, exhibiting that anybody may very well be an artist in the event that they put their thoughts to it.
Make a Salad, her most well-known work, is rooted in what is usually known as an occasion rating, or a text-based directive that may be enacted by its reader. That rating, on this case, consists solely of its title, with no directives on which elements to make use of and which steps to take. In meting out with a recipe and even exact directions, Knowles leaves her performers to finish the work with the information that many variations of it could consequence.
And certainly, simply that has occurred: Make a Salad has been carried out in loads of completely different variations, in venues starting from Artwork Basel in Switzerland to London’s Tate Fashionable, the place Knowles herself was as soon as enlisted to rake round a large salad shaped from cut-up greens. But Make a Salad, like a lot of Knowles’s most interesting occasion scores, needn’t be consumed—eaten or seen, that’s—in a museum. It may also be carried out with ease at house, too.
Make a Salad emblematized the openness of Knowles’s work. She has talked about that its preliminary iteration, staged in 1962 on the Institute of Up to date Arts London, arose as a result of she informally proposed to do one thing with meals, main her then husband, the artist Dick Higgins, to inform her to make a salad. However beneath its whimsy lay one thing extra severe.
“[Salad] was one thing that I cherished and understood methods to prepare dinner,” Knowles advised ARTnews in 2016, the yr she had a survey on the Carnegie Museum of Artwork in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, stating that she was by that time married and would quickly have two youngsters. “It was one thing that I knew I may do on a stage that perhaps a person couldn’t do as effectively.”
Works corresponding to this one made Knowles one of many key artists of the Fluxus motion, which was formalized in 1963 when George Maciunas issued a manifesto that inspired readers to “PURGE the world of lifeless artwork, imitation, synthetic artwork, summary artwork, illusionistic artwork, mathematical artwork—PURGE THE WORLD OF ‘EUROPANISM’!” The motion, which positioned an emphasis on efficiency and the utilization of simply accessed supplies, additionally got here to incorporate Yoko Ono, George Brecht, and others of word.
Knowles additionally produced an iconic Fluxus work with The Equivalent Lunch, a bit from the late Sixties whose occasion rating requires its reader to dine on the identical noon meal advert infinitum. The rating lists out “a tunafish sandwich on wheat toast with lettuce and butter, no mayo and a big glass of buttermilk or a cup of soup”—a lunch that Knowles herself ate at a New York diner many instances over earlier than conceiving the piece.
Knowles invited buddies such because the artists Shigeko Kubota and Ay-O to carry out The Equivalent Lunch and documented their expertise by way of images. However the piece’s magnificence lies in the truth that its requires an exercise so banal that anybody may by accident carry out it with out even noticing.
The piece “was about having an excuse to get to speak to folks, to note every thing that occurred, to concentrate,” Knowles advised the New York Occasions in 2011, the yr that the Museum of Fashionable Artwork staged a remake of the piece.
Alison Knowles was born in 1933 in Scarsdale, New York. As an undergraduate, she attended Middlebury School in Vermont, the place she gained the sense that she was not like different girls of her period. “After I was turned down for the society at Middlebury School, I spotted I had another path from the younger girls there, who have been going towards sororities and boyfriends,” she advised ARTnews.
Knowles had by then determined she wished to be a painter, and he or she continued her journey to change into one after her undergraduate years, finding out the medium on the Pratt Institute in New York. Josef Albers and Adolph Gottlieb taught her early on; she ended up destroying the work she made underneath their tutelage.
Being in New York in the course of the late Nineteen Fifties afforded Knowles a front-row seat to among the most experimental artwork choices of the period. She skilled, and even carried out in, Allan Kaprow’s Happenings, which known as for the enactment of weird performative gestures in installation-like settings, and grew pleasant with the dancer Merce Cunningham and the composer John Cage, with whom she went mushroom foraging.
Knowles went on to carry out in a 1962 occasion now remembered as the primary Fluxus live performance. Held in Wiesbaden, Germany, the live performance was staged earlier than an viewers unaccustomed to performative works corresponding to these. Some folks merely obtained up and left. “I shortly realized as a performer to simply proceed with what I used to be doing it doesn’t matter what,” she advised the Brooklyn Rail in 2001.
Knowles advised the Rail that her occasion scores have been “extra poetic than anything,” and certainly, she additionally wrote poetry and experimental compositions, a few of which have been revealed by One thing Else Press, co-run by Higgins, to whom she was married from 1960 to 1970. (Collectively, that they had had twin daughters, Hannah and Jessica, whom Knowles as soon as described as “my sisters in addition to my youngsters.”) By that press, Knowles collaborated with Cage on Notations, wherein a specific group of members got a bunch of 64 pre-selected phrases to craft their very own compositions, that determine being a reference to the variety of hexagrams within the I Ching.
She can be credited with having written among the first computer-generated poems. One in every of her extra well-known, “Home of Mud” (1967), was written with James Tenney utilizing the FORTRAN programming language. The poem describes each a home, the individuals who use it, and the supplies held by them, as recombined by a pc. “Exploring new media, for me, has at all times been a collaborative endeavor; it includes working with completely different folks and the various supplies and means we select,” she advised Artforum of the poem, which is able to quickly seem on the New Museum in New York.
Within the late ’60s and afterward, Knowles additionally made sculptural installations. Probably the most acclaimed of them, The Boat Guide, was produced in 1967 and later remade between 2014 and 2015 after the unique was destroyed. It includes a net of netting, a porthole-like aperture, and a fishing rod in homage to her brother, a fisherman who lived on Lengthy Island.
Working with the composer Joshua Selman, who helped set up her archives within the later levels of her profession, Knowles additionally produced such musical items as Frijoles Canyon (1992), that includes the sounds of the New Mexican panorama.
Knowles was a kind of uncommon artists who was well-known, regardless of having by no means fairly gained the institutional bona fides that many artists of her stature have. Her CV doesn’t record a single look in Documenta or the Whitney Biennial. (She did seem in a single Venice Biennale, in 1990.) Her first full-scale retrospective wasn’t even till 2022, when the Berkeley Artwork Museum and Pacific Movie Archive staged one. In 2024, that present traveled to Wiesbaden, the place the primary Fluxus live performance was staged.
Even nonetheless, Knowles appeared to get pleasure from the notion that she had amassed so many collaborators in her life. “I would like my work to increase the phrases of engagement,” she advised the New York Occasions in 2022. “I don’t need folks trying passively at my work however actively collaborating by touching, consuming, following an instruction about listening, bodily making or taking one thing, or becoming a member of in an exercise.”
