Alison Knowles
Maud Jacquin et Sébastin Pluot, The House of Dust by Alison Knowles, exh. cat., The James Gallery – The Graduate center (September – October 2016), ESBA TALM Angers, ENSA Paris-Cergy, CNAEI, Pantin, 2016
→Alison Kowles and Dick Higgins, Alison Kowles : the Big Book, Berlin, Passenger Books, 2013
→Alison Knowles, Clear skies all week, Paris, Onestar press, 2011
By the way of correspondence, Galerie Beim Steinernen Kreuz, Bremen, 2003
→Footnotes, Emily Harvay Gallery, New Yok City, October 2000
→Seachange, Emily Harvey Gallery, New York City, Caterina Gualco, Genova, Jacques Donguy, Paris, 1998-1999
Interview with Alison Knowles
Alison Knowles Make a Salad performance on the High Line
American visual artist and writer.
A founding member to the Fluxus movement in 1961, Alison Knowles abandoned on silk-screen painting at the end of the 1950s when she united with John Cage in the New York Mycological Society and turned towards the happening, or event, a form of short performance theorized by George Brecht. From 1960 to 1990 she also created scores, canvases on which the actions realised for various Fluxus festivals orchestrated by George Maciunas were improvised. She also created Fluxus objects – parodies of manufactured objects– and installations which, just as the system of composed scores in verbal instructions, marked a reflection on language according to unusual methods – a language neither functional nor poetic in the traditional sense of the term. She also extended the theme of the “book object” developed by G. Maciunas in 1963. In 1967 she realised The Big Book, an installation in the form of a book that the spectator could manipulate and that contained an oven, a telephone, chemical toilets, an art gallery – a book that conflated art and life.
If language can become a physical object, then it can also inversely become immaterial and musical. In the same year, the poem The House of Dust realised in collaboration with musician James Tenney was randomly generated by a computer and diffused in a fibreglass installation that the artist used in her teachings at CalArts from 1970-1972. She then developed works on music and sound. In 2003 she created several “paper instruments” that she activated during performances. She has published several books that reflect her artistic practice.
© Éditions des femmes – Antoinette Fouque, 2013
© Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, 2021
