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Alison Knowles (b. 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.
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.
Knowles studied in Pratt Institute. During night classes, she studied painting, during the day, she studied graphic design and commercial layout.
Knowles 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 (who later became her husband), George Brecht, Al Hansen and Allan Kaprow, took the historic class.
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. 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.
Knowles produced one of her earliest book objects, the Bean Rolls, in 1963. Unlike a traditional bound volume, the pages of this work are tiny paper scrolls, which the reader may select and view in any order. On each scroll, Knowles printed found texts collected from songs, recipes, stories, science, cartoons, and advertisements. The tin also contains dried beans, which create a rattling sound as the container is handled. In the 1960s, Knowles expanded on this performative aspect of Bean Rolls by staging readings with multiple participants.
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. 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. In the late 1960s, Knowles worked closely with Marcel Duchamp to recreate his first optical piece, the Coeurs Volants.
Event scores are performances invented by George Brecht, who was influenced by Cage's class in experimental composition. As Knowles puts it, an event score is “a one or two line recipe for action.” Knowles's The Identical Lunch (1969) is one of her more well-known scores based on her habit of eating the same food, at the same time each day. The score supposedly began after Philip Corner, her friend and fellow Fluxus member, commented on her daily lunch routine.
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. Shoes of Your Choice also debuted at the same time at the ICA. for that, Knowles asks the participants to simply describe the shoes they are wearing.
Knowles has been active in sound since the late 1960s. In 1969, Knowles designed and co-edited John Cage's Notations, a book of music manuscripts. Her Bean Garden, first presented at the Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York, consists of a large amplified platform covered with beans. It invites visitors to walk through the platform, allowing the sounds of the beans to resonate with each step.[19] Knowles has also created a series of sounded objects, including the bean turner (a handcrafted flax paper pouch filled with beans), wrist rubbers (flax paper “gloves” embedded with beans), and a bamboo and flax accordion.[20] Knowles's interest in the sounds produced by beans was explored in a series of four radio programs for the German audience. In 1982, Knowles was awarded the prestigious Karl Sczuka Award for best radio work from WDR for her event score, Bean Sequences.
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