Alison Knowles
American Visual and sound artist, writer
New York City, United States
Summary of Alison Knowles
Alison Knowles's art gives us many ideas that we now take for granted as aspects of contemporary artistic culture. These include the concept of chance-based performance as art; the idea of making the everyday and the domestic seem culturally and politically significant; the rejection of conventional artistic media and technical training; the implication that we can all make art, with materials that can be found easily and cheaply, close at hand. Part of the radical 1960s Fluxus scene, Knowles's influence in this regard is comparable to that of John Cage, particularly in the spheres of Performance art and modern experimental music, where her gustatory and food-themed pieces have had an enormous and enduring influence. She is a contemporary artist of the utmost significance.
Accomplishments
- Alison Knowles was a pioneer in the field of Performance art, learning many of her motifs and techniques from John Cage, a friend during the 1950s-60s. Knowles was one of the first artists to work with Event Scores: sets of written instructions to be performed with indeterminate and perhaps surprising results. This concept has had an indelible influence on Performance art and experimental music ever since.
- Knowles is unique amongst Fluxus artists in the thematic concerns of her work, which include domestic routines such as meal preparation and the rituals and bonding activities associated with eating. These are subtly feminist concerns, emphasizing the invisible labor and creative power of women, predicting the rise of feminist Performance art and Body Art from the 1970s onwards.
- Knowles's work is groundbreaking in the ways it interacts with the non-human. Often involving plants, vegetables, and pulses, it emphasizes the ways in which human routine and society is based on our cultivation and exploitation of, non-human beings and objects. This predicts modern ecological concerns and post-humanist critical philosophies.
The Life of Alison Knowles
P art of the rule-breaking 1960s Fluxus generation, Alison Knowles's performance-based artworks often involve food, drawing on her childhood in a small farming town in upstate New York, with a family that kept its own livestock.
Progression of Art
Make A Salad
Knowles's first Event Score, Make a Salad, was presented at the opening of the inaugural Fluxus exhibition in 1962. The performance involved the rhythmic chopping of a large number of vegetables, in time with a live musical accompaniment. The resulting ingredients were then assembled into a giant salad, which was subsequently served to the attendees. This piece, presented as a kind of concert, shifted focus from traditional instrumental performance and virtuosity to everyday domestic activities. The resulting artwork engaged both the auditory and gustatory senses, allowing participants to "ingest" the culmination of the performance.
In 2003, a new version of Make a Salad was performed in a concert hall, enhanced by the presence of an orchestra playing well-known classical compositions at the beginning and end of the salad preparation. This adaptation altered the status of the piece to that of a musical interlude, underscoring its nature as a musical performance. It also helped to prevent any misconception of the artwork as a parody of a classical concerto.
This piece is significant as a means of redefining perceptions of what constitutes a musical performance. It's not simply about using knives and cutting boards to create sound, nor is it akin to concrete music or the use of unconventional objects as instruments, which may still require advanced musical skill if played traditionally. Instead, it centers on the universal, everyday act of cooking, recontextualized as a form of music-making. It challenges the exalted status of the virtuoso, a figure so celebrated in Western music tradition, embracing a democratized, inclusive approach to performance. Make A Salad has become one of Knowles's best-known and loved works. In 2013, New York's MoMA even hosted a salad party as a memorial of this artwork. The organizer Julia Sherman said that "there's something really special about a work that's so intentionally open-ended that it can continue to interest an artist and an audience for so many years."
Event Score - First performed at the London's ICA Gallery
The Bean Rolls
The artwork consists of a tea-tin filled with scrolls, each inscribed with text on a topic related to some or other interpretation the word "bean". All the texts were sourced at New York Public Library. They include proverbs, stories, scientific data, and letters addressed to individuals named "Bean". Notably, the tin also contains actual dried beans. This artwork is one of the first examples of Knowles's obsession with the use of beans in her art. This obsession is not related to the botany, flavor, or form of the bean, but rather to the principles of Fluxus, which emphasized ease of performance and the lack of need for any special equipment to create art. Beans became the perfect symbol for this, a widely available seed, inexpensive, and a significant part of Knowles's childhood.
Knowles has referred to this piece as a "canned book," a powerful metaphor underscoring the indeterminate nature of the work. Unlike a conventional book, the components within can be experienced in any sequence, inviting the reader to engage with the work in myriad ways. By contrast, other works by Knowles and by the Fluxus movement more generally - such as hers and others' Event Scores - involve straightforward instructions with surprising results. We might therefore say that, whereas such works focus on indeterminacy of outcome, The Bean Rolls emphasizes indeterminacy of input.
This would turn out to be an important, genre-defining work for Knowles, the first "book" in a series that she would continue to produce throughout her career. Many of the elements present in The Bean Rolls would later be revisited, expanded upon, and recontextualized. This allowed Knowles to explore the full range of possibilities inherent in the concept of a book and the diverse experiences it could offer.
Book object - MoMA
Identical Lunch
The concept for this artwork began with a simple observation. One day, Fluxus artist Phillip Corner, a friend of Knowles, remarked on her daily habit, noting, "you are having an identical lunch." In response, Knowles formalized this ritual of eating the same dish each day as a performance. A compelling aspect of this work is its deeply personal nature. Very often, Knowles performs the piece privately, with no one else aware of it. Yet it invites anyone to participate in the performance once the dish's composition is known. The recipe is as follows: "A tuna fish sandwich on wheat toast, with lettuce and butter (no mayo), and a large glass of buttermilk."
Both privately and through public announcements, this work has been performed by Knowles alone, with friends, and by others who, upon learning the recipe, have engaged in the meal as a continuation of her timeless performance. Now, with the recipe in hand, each of us is invited to connect with this enduring, shared experience. This approach exemplifies a defining feature of the Fluxus movement: artworks composed of simple instructions and accessible materials, allowing anyone to participate.
Identical Lunch stands as one of the most representative works of the Fluxus movement and is arguably Knowles's best-known piece. It is not only widely discussed but also notable for the diverse range of artists who publicly performed the artwork and shared their experiences and photos through photobooks, shirts, canvases, and prints. Artists who decided to participate in the performance included Ay-O, Anne Brazeau, Shigeko Kubota, and George Maciunas, among others.
Performance - Riss Restaurant, Chelsea, New York
Bean Garden
The word "sandbox" often evokes freedom and carefree play, a central image in depictions of childhood. This sense of freedom and playfulness permeates Knowles's Bean Garden, a work where a sandbox - or more aptly, a "bean-box" - is placed for attendees to interact with at will.
To the surprise of those who engage with the piece, microphones are embedded at the bottom of the structure, capturing and amplifying the sounds created by each movement within the bean-filled box. This turns the Bean Garden into a form of walk-in, indeterminate musical instrument. Each action - digging, scattering beans, walking across, or building and collapsing forms - triggers unique sounds, transforming physical interaction into a rich, unpredictable auditory landscape. With Bean Garden, Knowles translates the tactile, playful possibilities of a sandbox into an immersive, auditory experience, inviting each participant to co-create the ever-changing artwork.
Bean Garden is perhaps most intuitive musical instrument designed by Knowles, not only because of how the sounds are produced but also because the form of the garden itself suggests a method of interaction. No instructions are needed. Anyone who has ever visited a park would instinctively know how to engage with this instrument. Additionally, this may be Knowles's most democratic artwork, as it resembles a sandbox, which could be especially appealing and intuitive for children.
Installation - Carnegie Museum of Art
Onion Skin Song
Versions of Knowles's Onion Skin Song have been performed since 1971 but the modern iteration can be dated back to 1998. To create this version of the work, pieces of onion skin are encased in plastic film and scanned through a blueprint machine to yield detailed, zoomed-in prints capturing the subtle tones and surface details of the peels. These prints, which Knowles dubs Onion Scrolls, are presented as musical scores in a concert room. Each score features the natural "drawings" and abstract shapes of the onion skin. Although they prompt auditory responses, the shapes do not have defined tonal parameters. Instead, the musical interpretation of the scrolls s entirely open to each performer's unique sensibilities.
The resulting musical work can be appreciated in and of itself. Unlike with other, similar works of Knowles's, which tend to be presented as an indivisible whole, versions of Onion Skin Song featuring only the musical realization have been presented and distributed. This said, the true essence of the piece lies in the performance itself, which unfolds as a layered, theatrical encounter. The performance space is adorned with abstract, translucent vellum scrolls, some of which are hung in view of the audience, inviting them to anticipate the performer's interpretive choices.
The openness of the piece - its lack of fixed instructions - infuses each performance with palpable unpredictability, rendering it both deeply personal and visually immersive. In Onion Skin Song, Knowles merges visual and auditory forms into a singularly evocative and active experience, challenging both the audience and the performers. This alone makes it one of her most memorable works. But the piece is also significant in being one of the first musical works to use electrical surface analysis on organic objects to create scores.
Music performance
Giant Bean Turner
A set of bean-filled flax paper sculptures, each capable of producing sounds in multiple ways, Giant Bean Turner exemplifies Knowles's exploration of sonic possibilities through humble materials. The most prominent of Knowles's Loose Page Sculptures series, the Giant Bean Turner stands out both for its dimensions and its range of sounds. When turned upside down, much like a rain stick, it produces the sounds of "roaring waves and high wind". When shaken or moved in any direction, the quality of sound varies, shifting from subtle to strident depending on the force and angle of the movement.
In her 2000 performance at the Guggenheim, Knowles invited visitors to interact with the instruments, encouraging them to create sounds and explore their sonic range. This performance differs slightly from Knowles´s other musical works, as it does not draw from daily activities, and the instruments are intentionally crafted rather than found. Yet the raw simplicity of the materials, the semi-indeterminate nature of the sounds, and the straightforwardness of its execution resonate with the core characteristics of Knowles's work and the ethos of the Fluxus movement.
Since the indeterminacy of this work lies in how the sound is produced from an organological perspective, no matter what the player does, achieving a distinctive sound will not be difficult. However, there remains an element of unpredictability in the outcome. This quality can be liberating, allowing the participant to feel more confident and to trust their musical intuition when interacting with the instrument without feeling the worry of making an unpleasant sound. This is important, as it broadens the concept of what a traditional musical instrument can be and plants the seeds for more democratic designs of musical instruments and performance devices. In addition, the fascinating visual characteristics and transparency of the flax paper allow the instruments to also serve as sculptures for contemplation. The artwork's multifaceted nature, combined with its lack of clear instructions, renders it indeterminate even at the conceptual level.
Sculpture, music instrument - Guggenheim
Biography of Alison Knowles
Childhood
Knowles was raised in Scarsdale, what was then a small farming town North of New York City. During World War II her family raised chickens for their own consumption, preserving them in cans after slaughter. Knowles was a sensitive child who found these experiences disconcerting, particularly as her mother had the unsettling habit of labeling each can with the name of the chicken stored in it, announcing its name again as they sat down to eat it.
These early memories played a formative role in Knowles's creative and emotional development. As an adult she became a vegan and had strong convictions about food. This would later inform her long-term friendship with the composer John Cage, another vegetarian.
Alison was the daughter of Ned Knowles, a professor of English at the Pratt Institute and New York University. Hannah B. Higgins, Alison's daughter , who has written about her mother's life and work, noted Ned's deep engagement with the celebrated Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes, and his extensive research on Thomas Shelton, the first translator of Don Quixote into English. These childhood influences help to contextualize the sense of humor and playfulness in many of Knowles's works. Sometimes, Alison's sense of humor as a child was seen as wayward or even wicked. On one occasion, she was caught going door to door in her neighborhood trying to sell "an attractive garden plant" which turned out to be poison ivy.
During high school Alison grew very tall, became nearsighted, and developed unusually large feet which required her to wear orthopedic shoes, something she found repellent. Hannah B. Higgins notes that in later life her mother "devised a score, Shoes of Your Choice (1963), which invited audience members to approach a microphone and describe their shoes in detail." This likely recalled her own anxiety about her eccentric footwear as a youngster. When asked if there was any connection between her childhood experience of buying shoes and the art piece in question, Knowles responded, "I think there is. A pair of shoes is very important to everyone."
Early Training and Work
Knowles initially enrolled at Middlebury College, a liberal arts college in Vermont, but soon transferred to the Fine Arts Institute at the Pratt Institute in New York City, where her father taught. Knowles studied under the famous Bauhaus artist and professor Josef Albers, as well as the post-Cubist German-American painter Richard Lindner, and took evening courses from the Abstract Expressionist painter Adolph Gottlieb. She graduated in 1956. During the late 1950s and early 1960s Knowles was a member of the New York Mycological Society, a group dedicated to the study of mushrooms, where she met John Cage. Their friendship deepened through shared discussions about food, conversations that would become central to Knowles's artistic practice. These dialogues resonate throughout her work, which frequently explores themes of sound and food. Her sonic experiments are also deeply influenced by Cage's avant-garde philosophy on sound, chance, and performance.
During this period Knowles forged connections with a number of artists later connected with the Fluxus movement. Many of these relationships left a lasting impact. On one occasion, the performance artist Dorothy Podber invited her to a gathering of "mostly gay men" in an unfamiliar apartment. At a certain point in the evening, the host secretly and unexpectedly called the police on his own party because he decided it had grown too late. After making the call, he concealed himself under the bed, where Knowles discovered him. She joined him in hiding and introduced herself. Her companion turned out to the artist and writer Dick Higgins. This unusual encounter marked the beginning of a long connection. Knowles and Higgins became close friends, married, divorced, and eventually remarried. Over the course of this complex and episodic relationship, they had two daughters, Jessica and Hannah B. Higgins.
During the 1960s Knowles became involved with Fluxus, an art movement characterized by its rejection of elitism in art and its commitment to universal access to performance . During this period, she adopted a concept from George Brecht known as the "Event Score." Knowles's developed her Event Scores during John Cage's famous classes on experimental music at New York's New School, and were subsequently emulated by many artists in the Fluxus movement.
To fully grasp the significance of Event Scores, it is essential to understand their relationship with the Western tradition of musical notation and the role of the musical score in directing performance. The traditional musical score created a clear distinction between musician and composer. While the point might seem obvious, a score itself is not music. It is a set of detailed performance instructions. Initially, scoring music was less about preserving compositions and more about achieving "determinacy", meaning consistency in volume, mood, speed, etcetera, across any given number of performances.
The twentieth century saw a drastic shift in the relationship between music and score, however. Composers and musicians began exploring the idea of indeterminacy, offering performers room for improvisation based on the elementary parameters laid down by the score. John Cage, Knowles's influential friend, was at the forefront of this process. His innovations included the idea of aleatoric (chance-based) music, prepared instruments (instruments physically altered so that they made unconventional sounds), and conceptual works like 4'33". For the duration of this short piano piece, the pianist was to sit at the piano remaining silent, while the ambient sounds inside and outside the performance space, as well as any noises or actions made by the audience in response, itself comprised the music.
Inspired by Cage, Knowles started creating Event Scores. Like some other Event Scores created by members of the Fluxus movement, Knowles's scores were created not for musicians but for the public, prompting them to execute simple, clearly defined actions with surprising outcomes. These instructions did not involve conventional musical instruments but instead incorporated everyday activities such as cooking or talking, transforming them into aspects of musical performance. At the same time, Knowles expanded her practice with other sound experiments, including some designed to be performed in more predictable or pre-determined ways.
Mature Period
Across the 1960s, Knowles both responded to, and distinguished her work from, her contemporaries in the Fluxus movement. In the first case, she began to experiment with what became known as "book objects", artworks exploring the sculptural potential of the book which retained a thematic or allusive connection to processes of reading and histories of literature. These works can be viewed in relation to the book-objects and so-called Flux Boxes of George Maciunas and other Fluxus artists, three-dimensional and portable objects which often included removable parts and elements, including written material and other ephemera which tied them to the historic form of the book.
Famous book-objects of Knowles's include The Bean Rolls (1963), a tea-tinned filled with scrolls on different topics related to beans, and The Big Book (1967), a walk-in sculpture made up of eight 'pages' anchored to a metal spine. This huge, inhabitable artwork was made from found scrap materials and included elements such as a miniature gallery, grass-filled tunnel, and a window. This large-scale installation was the first of several, including more recent book-objects such as The Boat Book (2014-15).
As well as exploring the sculptural and tactile possibilities of the book as form, Knowles was active in the experimental poetry scene of the 1960s. Part of the ethos of Fluxus was to break down traditional barriers between different artforms. As part of this generation it was natural that Knowles would see her work as intrinsically poetic, given its focus on language and performance.
Perhaps Knowles's most famous poem-work of the 1960s-70s is The House of Dust, which is also a significant early example of computer-generated poetry and of multi-media poetics. Knowles created a set of four lists, identifying respectively, houses made of a range of d ifferent materials, varioys different locations, a series of different light sources, and different sets of inhabitants for the structure. The composer James Terney used an early IBM computer to turn the lists into lines of poetry shuffling randomly through different variations.
The resulting poem was shown in the seminal computer art exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity, held at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1968. Across the rest of the decade and during the 1970s, various sculpture-cum-houses were built based on one of the poem's quatrains: "a house of dust / on open ground / lit by natural light / inhabited by friends and enemies". One of the most famous appeared on the grounds of CalArts, where Knowles taught from 1970 to 1972.
Over subsequent decades, Knowles's practice continued to expand. During the 1980s, Knowles's book objects evolved into a new series known as Loose Page Sculptures, using flax paper as a medium to represent human figures and explore political themes. Many of these sculptures were filled with beans, with the intention that they could double as musical instruments. She also continued to create new book objects outside the Loose Page Sculptures series. Increasingly, these works delved into themes of sensory experience, bodily perception, and language. There was also an increasing emphasis on "rejected" or "unusual" configurations of elements.
A notable later book object is Knowles's Finger Book, composed of carved fragments and Braille-inscribed sculptures. Unlike her other book objects, this work emphasized touch over sight. It was presented in multiple languages, challenging the monolingual paradigm of traditional books and reading practices.
Despite this new focus, the signature elements of Knowles's work remained consistent. But they were transformed through addition and layering. From this period onward, her performances increasingly combined her characteristic themes and objects - beans, paper, sound, and negative space - which before had been presented in isolation from each other.
Late Period
Throughout her career, Knowles has consistently expanded upon her earlier explorations in sound, book objects, page sculptures, and Event Scores, continuously adding layers of complexity to her work.
Beginning in the 2000s, she revisited and reinterpreted several of her earlier pieces. A notable example is her seminal 1962 work Make a Salad, which was re-performed in 2003 with significant modifications.
For the later iteration, live orchestras performed works by well-known classical composers such as Beethoven and Bach at the beginning and conclusion of the Event Score, reinforcing its status as a musical performance. The piece was also staged in a concert hall rather than a visual arts institution, further emphasizing its musical nature.
Similarly, while her early sound experiments focused on interactions between beans and paper, from the 2000s onwards Knowles directed her efforts toward exploring paper as a musical instrument in and of itself. This exploration went beyond the material's physical properties; Knowles embraced the inherent indeterminacy of the resulting sounds. As the artist herself explains, "I think the main thing I've discovered about paper in the past five years is that it can form itself...you get something which you could never predict."
During her later period, Knowles has expanded her engagement with printing techniques, including by adding blank and negative spaces into existing printed works. She has also approached music composition with a noticeably increased focus on conventional form, bringing in fewer theatrical interventions and collaged or concrete sounds, and placing greater emphasis on compositions resembling traditional Western music. Despite this shift, her later compositions have retained distinctly Fluxus-inspired elements. Throughout her career, Knowles has consistently maintained the indeterminacy that became a hallmark of her practice early on.
The Legacy of Alison Knowles
Perhaps surprisingly few artists tend to acknowledge Knowles's individual influence, with notable exceptions such as Kirsten Justesen. However, almost all of contemporary art is indelibly influenced by Fluxus, the artistic movement which Knowles co-founded . Many artworks reflecting that influence seem in particular to derive from her innovations. It was in the nature of Fluxus to emphasize collective over individual creativity. In this sense, the crediting of the group rather than individual influence by subsequent generations makes sense.
Mamoru Fujieda's Patterns of Plants, a series of compositions created between 1996 and 2011, bears a striking resemblance to Knowles's Onion Skin Song (1971). In both works, the artists use devices capable of analyzing electrical fluctuations on the surface of organic matter, translating these results into music.
In Knowles's case, the form and shape of the onion skins were interpreted and translated into a performance. Fujieda, on the other hand, goes further by using electromagnetic data from plant scans to directly map parameters and create musical compositions, setting microtonal temperaments. The act of translating non-musical data and images into sound, known as "sonification," has long been utilized for research purposes. However, Knowles's Onion Skin Song may be one of the earliest instances of using sonification techniques to create art.
Another technique of Knowles's involving data translation was used in House of Dust (1967), for which a poem was generated randomly from computer code. The curators Katherine Carl, Maud Jacquin, and Sébastien Pluot, responsible for the exhibition at James Gallery where House of Dust was first presented, note that House of Dust´s approach to poetry influenced many of the artists at the gallery to explore various forms of responsive artworks, architecture, and installations. Many works described today as "algorithmic" or "generative" could be considered to extend the ideas in House of Dust.
One achievement which Knowles shares with John Cage is the toppling of the dominant idea of determinacy in modern art and, particularly, music. Today, countless composers use techniques that are essentially consolidating Cage's and Knowles's early advancements. Compositions are made with rearrangeable sheet music, as in Dai Fujikura's Cosmic Maps (2014). There are works of controlled aleatoricism, whereby the musical instructions are not completely indeterminate but offer parameters for the performer to achieve a kind of "controlled freedom", as in Toru Takemitsu's Rain Spell (1982). And there are scored works with fully indeterminate passages, including pieces by Lutosławski, Leo Brouwer, and other notables.
Beyond these specific aesthetic and formal legacies, Knowles's practice is subtly predictive of many wider aspects of our contemporary arts scene. In particular, her work can be seen to embody feminist concerns in its focus on domestic activities, labor, and ritual, bringing a sense of visibility, spectacle, and even grandeur to these. Knowles taught at CalArts during 1970-72, during which time the iconic Feminist Art Program was established by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. In the politicized Feminist, Performance and Body Art which emerged from that program, and whose legacy can be seen in the work of many subsequent artists such as Marina Abramović, we can sense an inheritance from Knowles's earlier breakthroughs.
Knowles is also a pioneer in bringing everyday materials into her practice, in a way which refuses the rarefied and institutionalized atmosphere of fine art. In particular, her work with foodstuffs, plant-life, vegetables, and pulses, predicts the ways in which contemporary art and theory has increasingly explored humankind's economic and emotional relationships with non-human objects and materials. Perhaps above all, however, Knowles's legacy is in showing us the indelible connection of art to everyday life: that any activity can be viewed as art, any object and substance can become materials for art, and any of us can choose to see ourself as an artist.