Colby Chamberlain on Alison Knowles
FEW TITLES ENCAPSULATE an exhibition’s argument as succinctly as “by Alison Knowles: A Retrospective (1960–2022).” Curator Karen Moss borrows that “by” from a slim quantity of the identical title, a group of the artist’s compositions issued by means of the “Nice Bear” pamphlet collection of One thing Else Press in 1965. The preposition’s pliability is the purpose. Most clearly, “by” denotes authorship, as in a corpus of texts written by Alison Knowles, but it additionally suggests facilitation, a course of led to via Alison Knowles, or proximity, i.e., shut by Alison Knowles. In a piece by Alison Knowles, company is extra a operate of adjacency, attachment, or intimacy than of possession. Maintaining “by” in decrease case cleverly accentuates the theme of open-endedness, although it could have merely been the results of a typo left unattended. In interviews, Knowles has acknowledged that her late husband, Dick Higgins, the polymath writer of SEP, launched into the galleys a number of errors and ambiguities that persist to today.1 Thumb by means of the literature on Knowles and also you’ll discover the three phrases that make up her most well-known rating—“Make a salad”—recognized variously as Proposition, Proposition #2, and Proposition #2: Make a Salad. I don’t need to say too many cooks spoil the broth, since Knowles herself actually wouldn’t, so let’s combine metaphors: Cooks taking part in a sport of phone will mess with the recipe.
“by Alison Knowles” opens this July on the College of California, Berkeley Artwork Museum and Pacific Movie Archive. An accompanying catalogue consists of new essays by Moss, Lauren Fulton, Nicole Woods, and Caroline Ugelstad, in addition to a foreword by Knowles’s daughter, the artwork historian Hannah B. Higgins. This would be the octogenarian’s first full retrospective, however Knowles has hardly been absent from the general public eye. Lately, she has carried out Proposition to very large audiences worldwide. Greater than two thousand Londoners gathered to witness and partake within the sprawling salad that Knowles ready on a tarp stretched throughout Tate Trendy’s Turbine Corridor in 2008.2 Such events now exude an air of celebration. The festivity of a gaggle meal doubles as a commemoration of Knowles herself, the only real girl onstage throughout the 1962–63 European live performance tour that birthed the Fluxus motion and an early progenitor of incorporating meals into high-quality artwork. (Not so subtly, Moss situates Proposition as an antecedent to relational aesthetics by together with an undated {photograph} of Rirkrit Tiravanija visiting Knowles in her SoHo loft.) In response to Fluxus artist Emmett Williams, a far completely different temper prevailed at Proposition’s 1962 debut at London’s Institute of Modern Arts. “The salad was made in an enormous pickle barrel . . . by a dozen performers and served as much as a whole lot of spectators,” he recalled. “Earlier than lengthy not solely was there whole involvement of spectators and performers within the piece, however the Institute was remodeled right into a nightmarish, sticky urbane picnic.”3
Nightmarish. Sticky. Urbane. Such a pungent concatenation of adjectives. What did Williams apprehend within the first iteration of Proposition that eludes discover now? Although technically monographic, “by Alison Knowles” essentially convenes a whole Fluxus ensemble. Isolating Knowles from Higgins, Williams, George Brecht, Philip Nook, Shigeko Kubota, George Maciunas, Benjamin Patterson, Nam June Paik, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi, and the omnipresent John Cage is like extracting the glue from a collage. In my expertise, the perfect Fluxus exhibitions keep away from greedy at epistemologically slippery questions on what Fluxus was and as a substitute discover what Fluxus can nonetheless do. (For example, on the James Gallery on the Metropolis College of New York Graduate Heart in 2016, curators Katherine Carl, Maud Jacquin, and Sébastien Pluot leveraged Knowles’s FORTRAN-poem-slash-fiberglass-domicile Home of Mud, 1969, as a premise for soliciting contributions from an intergenerational roster of artists, architects, musicians, and poets.) Hopefully, “by Alison Knowles” can accomplish each, surveying previous achievements whereas additionally tapping into present potential. By Knowles, with Knowles, by means of Knowles, we will find fashions for collaboration and participation that stay cheesy to the contact.
IN 1972, the Italian artwork historian Daniela Palazzoli answered one in all Maciunas’s semiregular requires proposals with options for an Adam-and-Eve set of multiples. Every field would comprise picks of gender-specific smells, corresponding to fragrance and detergent for “Eve” or aftershave and petrol for “Adam.” She signed off by scrawling in enormous block letters, IT’S TIME TO BRING OUT A FEMINIST FLUXUS LINE.4 The sentiment seems unduly dismissive of Knowles and different girls already affiliated with the motion, however Palazzoli was not alone in failing to acknowledge a feminist dimension to Fluxus aesthetics. That very same 12 months, Knowles was educating at CalArts and appeared so out of step with the Southern California girls’s motion that she was barred from contributing to Womanhouse, the legendary set up organized by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro’s Feminist Artwork Program, partly on the grounds that she permitted males to hitch her courses.5 An sufficient language for articulating the feminist politics of Knowles’s work didn’t but exist and wouldn’t develop into obtainable till the arrival of gender-performativity concept practically twenty years later.6
Parsing Knowles’s follow requires two ideas coined by the boys round her. First comes Brecht’s “occasion rating,” the tersely worded prompts that fashioned the idea of Fluxus’s call-and-response collectivity and furnished the repertoire for his or her concert events. The occasion rating has typically been likened to the typewritten statements of Conceptual artwork, however, as Natilee Harren reveals in her 2020 e-book Fluxus Kinds, its origins lie within the graphic compositions of Cage, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff.7 An occasion rating establishes a diagram of brokers, actions, and objects that may be endlessly substituted and rearranged, like items on a chessboard. Second is “intermedia,” Higgins’s time period for artworks that “fall between media.”8 Distinct from “multimedia,” intermedia doesn’t amalgamate media a lot as collapse the divisions amongst them. Pointing to John Heartfield’s photomontages (“the land between collage and pictures”) and Marcel Duchamp’s readymades (“between sculpture and one thing else”), Higgins predicted that artists would finally discover territories as arcane as “the intermedium between portray and footwear.”9 Knowles arguably did simply that in 1991 with Damaged Line with Slippers, which may be both worn in your ft or hung from the wall.10
Knowles’s earliest compositions reveal the capability of occasion scores and intermedia to unsettle the id classes that Palazzoli’s Adam-and-Eve proposal took with no consideration. Think about Nivea Cream Piece (November 1962)—for Oscar Williams:
First performer comes on stage with a bottle of hand cream, labeled “Nivea Cream” if none is offered. He pours the cream onto his palms, and massages them in entrance of the microphone. Different performers enter, one after the other, and do the identical factor. Then they be part of collectively in entrance of the microphone to make a mass of massaging palms. They depart within the reverse of the order they entered, on a sign from the primary performer.11
As a rating, Nivea Cream Piece establishes an internet of relations that interferes with what Judith Butler calls “materialization”—the iterative course of by which bodily matter is made intelligible in line with preexisting norms.12 A row of neatly dressed performers lose their particular person attributes and develop into a “mass of massaging palms.” (The flip of phrase strikingly prefigures the title of Marshall McLuhan’s 1967 “stock of results,” The Medium Is the Therapeutic massage.) As intermedia, the piece unleashes squeamish, gurgling music from a configuration of lotion, pores and skin, and digital amplification. Neglect telling the dancer from the dance: How do you distinguish the instrumentalists from the devices when the sound you hear arises from the absorption of unguents into flesh?
What else renders the physique porous? The salad in Proposition; the beans within the half-edible, half-legible a number of Bean Rolls, 1963–64; the tuna-fish sandwich on wheat toast with butter and lettuce, no mayo, and a glass of buttermilk or a cup of soup in The An identical Lunch, 1967. These are all store-bought commodities that nominally connote female domesticity, but Knowles exploits their materials properties to dissolve all method of boundaries. Maybe we would most instantly understand the “nightmarish” character of Proposition by replicating how we expertise most nightmares: with eyes closed. Simply as a dollop of raspberry-balsamic dressing permeates a bowl of components, the intermedia live performance of smells, sounds, textures, and tastes emanating from a lot chopping, chewing, clattering, and swallowing envelops a crowd. This can be a scene of conviviality, however not within the cheerily social sense Nicolas Bourriaud employs it in Relational Aesthetics.13 Moderately, it comes nearer to theorist Jasbir Okay. Puar’s definition of conviviality as an occasion whereby our bodies slip freed from fastened identities and merge into weak, probably dangerous new assemblages.14 In different phrases, a sticky urbane picnic.
“BY ALISON KNOWLES” will cowl way over the handful of works mentioned right here. Of explicit be aware are Knowles’s architectural intermedia initiatives The Large Guide, 1967; The Guide of Bean, 1982; and The Boat Guide, 2014, in addition to her long-running experiments with printmaking. It deserves point out that a number of of Knowles’s silk-screen items predate these of Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. Why, then, is the approach principally related along with her art-star male contemporaries? The query solutions itself, however an extra issue could possibly be Knowles’s deliberate lack of funding in definitively authoring her work. A silk display “by Alison Knowles” was a method for collaboration or the enactment of a rating.15 Knowles regarded a silk display as one thing that passes between folks, the residue of an encounter that sticks with you.
“by Alison Knowles: A Retrospective (1960–2022)” shall be on view July 20 by means of December 18 on the College of California, Berkeley Artwork Museum and Pacific Movie Archive.
Colby Chamberlain’s e-book Fluxus Administration is forthcoming from the College of Chicago Press. This summer time, he joins the Cleveland Institute of Artwork as faculty-in-residence.
NOTES
1. Julia Robinson, “The Sculpture of Indeterminacy: Alison Knowles’s Beans and Variations,” Artwork Journal 63, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 99.
2. Alison Knowles, “Fluxus Lengthy Weekend,” PAJ: A Journal of Efficiency and Artwork 31, no. 1 (January 2009): 140–48.
3. Emmett Williams, “The Large Guide of Alison Knowles,” 10, 1967, I.55.14, Jean Brown Papers, the Getty Analysis Institute, Los Angeles (JBP). Williams printed an early draft of the essay as “Alison in Wonderland,” BOOKS (September 1966): 10–12. My because of Nicole Woods for sharing this bibliographic info.
4. Daniela Palazzoli to George Maciunas, March 23, 1972, I.31.22, JBP.
5. Nicole L. Woods, “Object Poems: Alison Knowles’s Feminist Archite(x)ture,” X-TRA 15, no. 1 (Fall 2012): 22–23.
6. Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Child, Papa’s Possibly: An American Grammar Guide,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer season 1987): 65–81; Judith Butler, Gender Hassle: Feminism and the Subversion of Identification (New York: Routledge, 1990); Judith Butler, Our bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Intercourse” (New York: Routledge, 1993).
7. Natilee Harren, “Diagramming Type, from Graphic Notation to the Fluxus Occasion Rating,” in Fluxus Kinds: Scores, Multiples, and the Everlasting Community (Chicago: College of Chicago Press, 2020), 27–70.
8. Dick Higgins, “Intermedia,” The One thing Else E-newsletter 1, no. 1 (February 1966): 1.
9. Higgins, “Intermedia,” 2.
10. Robinson, “The Sculpture of Indeterminacy,” 110.
11. Alison Knowles, by Alison Knowles (New York: One thing Else Press, 1965), 3.
12. Butler, Our bodies That Matter, 4–12.
13. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Dijon, France: Les Presses du Réel, 2002), 30–32.
14. Jasbir Okay. Puar, “Prognosis Time: In direction of a Geopolitics of Have an effect on, Debility and Capability,” Girls & Efficiency: A Journal of Feminist Concept 19, no. 2 (July 2009): 168–69. See additionally Colby Chamberlain, “Essential Care: On the Artwork of Park McArthur,” Artforum, October/November 2020, 155–56; Colby Chamberlain, “Prescribed Performances: Fluxus and Incapacity,” October no. 177 (Summer season 2021): 39–45.
15. Harry J. Weil, “Sandwiches, Silkscreens, Swatches, and Scores: A Dialog with Alison Knowles,” Afterimage 38, no. 5 (2011): 15–17.
