Alison Knowles, a powerhouse in postwar experimental artwork and a cofounder of the Fluxus motion, handed away at her residence in New York Metropolis on October 29 at age 92. Her loss of life was confirmed by James Fuentes gallery, which represented her.
Knowles labored not solely between disciplines however between media, seemingly exploding the boundaries of each type she inhabited. Over a six-decade profession, she was a pioneer in process-based artwork, relational aesthetics, computer-based artwork, and extra, incorporating each likelihood and sound whereas drawing upon the political resonances of on a regular basis objects. She rejected not solely the boundaries of the artwork world, but in addition the borders between artwork object and out of doors world. “People don’t touch art,” she stated in a 2010 oral historical past with the Archives of American Artwork. “That’s one of the problems.” Certainly, as critic Sally Deskins wrote in Hyperallergic in 2016, “Knowles asks us to physically experience the now.”
Alison Knowles, “Music by Alison,” carried out throughout Totally Assured 12 Fluxus Concert events, New York on Could 23, 1964, gelatin silver print (© Alison Knowles; photograph courtesy Hannah Higgins)
Knowles was born within the Westchester suburb of Scarsdale, New York, in 1933. She attended Middlebury Faculty in Vermont earlier than transferring to the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, learning underneath painter Richard Lindner and summary expressionist Adolph Gottlieb, in addition to Coloration Area pioneer Josef Albers throughout a summer time course at Syracuse College.
In New York within the Nineteen Fifties, she discovered herself dabbling in all arenas of latest and experimental artwork. She each attended and carried out in Allan Kaprow’s “Happenings.” She joined the New York Mycological Society, the place she met luminaries like composer John Cage and artist, historian, and organizer George Maciunas. Together with these two, she was a founding member of the Fluxus motion, collaborating in its first efficiency in 1962 alongside artists like Nam June Paik as the one lady within the group.
Newspaper clipping depicting Alison Knowles performing “The Big Book” (1967) (photograph courtesy Hannah Higgins)
Knowles married fellow Fluxus artist Dick Higgins in 1960, with whom she had twin daughters Hannah and Jessica, described in a 2002 interview as “my sisters as well as my children.” In 1963, the pair based One thing Else Press, which printed intermedia guide artwork meant to be broadly accessible. There, she would design and co-edit John Cage’s Notations (1969), a guide of music manuscripts. (She and Higgins divorced in 1970.)
Alison Knowles (middle) performing “Make a salad” on the Institute of Up to date Arts, London, on October 24, 1962 (photograph courtesy Hannah Higgins)
She continued to experiment with the shape in particular person works, resembling large-scale installations like “The Boat Book” (1979), through which “readers” might stroll by means of pages, and works like “Bean Rolls” (1963) — a well-liked materials for his or her affordability and universality — which reconstituted on a regular basis objects into books. She turned pages into devices and labored with grasp papermaker Coco Gordon to create a guide through which sections correspond to components of the physique (Unfastened Pages, 1983).
“It was our own way of scoring our actions or performances in a manner as serious as a score by Satie,” she informed the New York Instances in 2022. “A sentence like ‘Make a salad,’ that’s the event score.”
Alison Knowles, “The House of Dust” (1967/2021) (photograph by Wolfgang Günzel through Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
She was additionally credited for co-creating what’s now thought of one of many world’s first computer-generated poems with composer James Tenney. “The House of Dust” (1967), made in an early programming language on an IBM laptop, can be restaged as a part of the New Museum’s inaugural exhibition for its reopening.
Her work is held in main collections, together with the Museum of Fashionable Artwork, the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, and the Whitney Museum of American Artwork, in addition to the Artwork Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian American Artwork Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork, the Tate Fashionable in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Knowles can be remembered for her radical interventions in type, her emphasis on the poetry within the bodily world, and her insistence on artwork as a lived type. Because the artist put it in a 2011 interview, artwork, for her, “was about having an excuse to get to talk to people, to notice everything that happened, to pay attention.”
