Alison Knowles, a leading artist of the Fluxus movement of the 1960s and the brain behind such beloved pieces as Make a Salad (1962), died at 92 in New York on October 29. Her gallery, the New York–based James Fuentes, announced her passing but did not specify a cause.
Many of Knowles’s sculptures, performances, and musical works were so simple that anyone could produce them, which was exactly their point. Using materials as quotidian as dried beans, shells, netting, and tunafish, Knowles transformed the everyday into art, showing that anyone could be an artist if they put their mind to it.
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Make a Salad, her most famous work, is rooted in what is commonly called an event score, or a text-based directive that can be enacted by its reader. That score, in this case, consists only of its title, with no directives on which ingredients to use and which steps to take. In dispensing with a recipe or even precise instructions, Knowles leaves her performers to complete the work with the knowledge that many versions of it may result.
And indeed, just that has happened: Make a Salad has been performed in plenty of different variations, in venues ranging from Art Basel in Switzerland to London’s Tate Modern, where Knowles herself was once enlisted to rake around a massive salad formed from cut-up greens. Yet Make a Salad, like many of Knowles’s finest event scores, need not be consumed—eaten or seen, that is—in a museum. It can also be performed with ease at home, too.
Make a Salad emblematized the openness of Knowles’s work. She has mentioned that its initial iteration, staged in 1962 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts London, arose because she informally proposed to do something with food, leading her then husband, the artist Dick Higgins, to tell her to make a salad. But beneath its whimsy lay something more serious.
“I was a married woman with two children,” Knowles told ARTnews in 2016, the year she had a survey at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “[Salad] was something that I loved and understood how to cook…. It was something that I knew I could do on a stage that maybe a man couldn’t do as well.”
Works such as this one made Knowles one of the key artists of the Fluxus movement, which was formalized in 1963 when George Maciunas issued a manifesto that encouraged readers to “PURGE the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art, abstract art, illusionistic art, mathematical art—PURGE THE WORLD OF ‘EUROPANISM’!” The movement, which placed an emphasis on performance and the usage of easily accessed materials, also came to include Yoko Ono, George Brecht, and others of note.
Knowles also produced an iconic Fluxus work with The Identical Lunch, a piece from the late 1960s whose event score calls for its reader to dine on the same midday meal ad infinitum. The score lists out “a tunafish sandwich on wheat toast with lettuce and butter, no mayo and a large glass of buttermilk or a cup of soup”—a lunch that Knowles herself ate at a New York diner many times over before conceiving the piece.
Knowles invited friends such as the artists Shigeko Kubota and Ay-O to perform The Identical Lunch and documented their experience through photography. But the piece’s beauty lies in the fact that its calls for an activity so banal that anyone could accidentally perform it without even noticing.
The piece “was about having an excuse to get to talk to people, to notice everything that happened, to pay attention,” Knowles told the New York Times in 2011, the year that the Museum of Modern Art staged a remake of the piece.
Alison Knowles was born in 1933 in Scarsdale, New York. As an undergraduate, she attended Middlebury College in Vermont, where she gained the sense that she was not like other women of her era. “When I was turned down for the society at Middlebury College, I realized I had some other path from the young women there, who were going toward sororities and boyfriends,” she told ARTnews.
Knowles then set out to become a painter, studying the medium at the Pratt Institute in New York. Josef Albers and Adolph Gottlieb taught her early on; she ended up destroying the paintings she made under their tutelage.
Being in New York during the late 1950s afforded Knowles a front-row seat to some of the most experimental art offerings of the era. She experienced Allan Kaprow’s Happenings, which called for the enactment of bizarre performative gestures in installation-like settings, and grew friendly with the dancer Merce Cunningham and the composer John Cage, with whom she went mushroom foraging.
Knowles went on to perform in a 1962 event now remembered as the first Fluxus concert. Held in Wiesbaden, Germany, the concert was staged before an audience unaccustomed to performative works such as these. Some people simply got up and left. “I quickly learned as a performer to just proceed with what I was doing no matter what,” she told the Brooklyn Rail in 2001.
Knowles told the Rail that her event scores were “more poetic than anything else,” and indeed, she also wrote poetry and experimental compositions, some of which were published by Something Else Press, co-run by Higgins, to whom she was married from 1960 to 1970. (Together, they had had twin daughters, Hannah and Jessica, whom Knowles once described as “my sisters as well as my children.”) Through that press, Knowles collaborated with Cage on Notations, in which a selected group of participants were given a group of 64 pre-selected words to craft their own compositions, that figure being a reference to the number of hexagrams in the I Ching.
She is also credited with having written some of the first computer-generated poems. One of her more famous, “House of Dust” (1967), was written with James Tenney using the FORTRAN programming language. The poem describes both a house, the people who use it, and the materials held by them, as recombined by a computer. “Exploring new media, for me, has always been a collaborative endeavor; it involves working with different people and the diverse materials and means we choose,” she told Artforum of the poem, which will soon appear at the New Museum in New York.
In the late ’60s and afterward, Knowles also made sculptural installations. The most acclaimed of them, The Boat Book, was produced in 1967 and later remade between 2014 and 2015 after the original was destroyed. It features a web of netting, a porthole-like aperture, and a fishing rod in homage to her brother, a fisherman who lived on Long Island.
Working with the composer Joshua Selman, who helped organize her archives in the later stages of her career, Knowles also produced such musical pieces as Frijoles Canyon (1992), featuring the sounds of the New Mexican landscape.
Knowles was one of those rare artists who was famous, despite having never quite gained the institutional bona fides that many artists of her stature have. Her CV doesn’t list a single appearance in the Venice Biennale, Documenta, or even the Whitney Biennial; her first full-scale retrospective wasn’t even until 2022, when the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive staged one. In 2024, that show traveled to Wiesbaden, where the first Fluxus concert was staged.
Even still, Knowles seemed to take pleasure in the notion that she had amassed so many collaborators in her life. “I want my work to expand the terms of engagement,” she told the New York Times in 2022. “I don’t want people looking passively at my work but actively participating by touching, eating, following an instruction about listening, physically making or taking something, or joining in an activity.”
