More about Alison Knowles
Works by Alison Knowles
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Fluxus artist Alison Knowles is full of surprises.
The artistic career of Alison Knowles began early. She was born in 1933 in New York and decided to be an artist when, at six or seven years old, her grandmother hung her pencil drawing over the piano. When she trained as an artist, she admired the works of Helen Frankenthaler and also got familiar with the work of Jackson Pollock. Her own work, though, would go in quite a different direction when she realized painting was not her passion.
Alison Knowles was an important member of the avant-garde art and performance movement called Fluxus. Fluxus artists intended to integrate real life and art by, for example, using ordinary materials and in-person, live experiences for performances and conceptual art pieces. Traditional art forms like painting were not very popular among Fluxus artists and after her first one-person show in 1958, Alison Knowles destroyed all her paintings in a bonfire behind her brother's country house. This was a very "Fluxus" thing to do.
Alison Knowles is also known for her event scores, which are performances with very simple instructions. One example of this is her famous work Make A Salad, during which the artist prepares an actual salad for the audience to eat. She performed the piece several times and served her salad to a crowd of more than 2000 people in 2008 at the Tate Modern in London. Even if you didn’t like the performance, at least you got a – hopefully – delicious salad out of your museum visit!
Sources
Sources
- Bloch, Mark. “The Boat Book: Alison Knowles.” Whitehot Magazine, January, 2014. https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/boat-book-alison-knowles/3113.
- Britannica. “Fluxus.” Accessed September 19, 2022. https://www.britannica.com/art/Fluxus.
- Center for Book Arts. “Alison Knowles.” Accessed September 19, 2022. https://centerforbookarts.org/people/alison-knowles.
- Knowles, Alison. “Interview with Alison Knowles.” Interview by Ruud Janssen. Fluxus Heidelberg Center, 2007.
- Woods, Nicole L. “Taste Economies: Alison Knowles, Gordon Matta-Clark and the intersection of food, time and performance.” Performance Research 19, no. 3 (2014): 157-161.
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Here is what Wikipedia says about Alison Knowles
Alison Knowles (born 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. She graduated from Pratt Institute in New York with an honors degree in fine art. In May 2015, she was awarded an honorary doctorate degree by Pratt.
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.
From July 20, 2022 to February 12, 2023, Knowles was the subject of by Alison Knowles: A Retrospective (1960–2022) at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
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