Alison Knowles, a powerhouse in postwar experimental art and a cofounder of the Fluxus movement, passed away at her home in New York City on October 29 at age 92. Her death was confirmed by James Fuentes gallery, which represented her.
Knowles worked not only between disciplines but between media, seemingly exploding the boundaries of every form she inhabited. Over a six-decade career, she was a pioneer in process-based art, relational aesthetics, computer-based art, and more, incorporating both chance and sound while drawing upon the political resonances of everyday objects. She rejected not only the boundaries of the art world, but also the borders between art object and outside world. “People don’t touch art,” she said in a 2010 oral history with the Archives of American Art. “That’s one of the problems.” Indeed, as critic Sally Deskins wrote in Hyperallergic in 2016, “Knowles asks us to physically experience the now.”
Alison Knowles, “Music by Alison,” performed during Fully Guaranteed 12 Fluxus Concerts, New York on May 23, 1964, gelatin silver print (© Alison Knowles; photo courtesy Hannah Higgins)
Knowles was born in the Westchester suburb of Scarsdale, New York, in 1933. She attended Middlebury College in Vermont before transferring to the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, studying under painter Richard Lindner and abstract expressionist Adolph Gottlieb, as well as Color Field pioneer Josef Albers during a summer course at Syracuse University.
In New York in the 1950s, she found herself dabbling in all arenas of contemporary and experimental art. She both attended and performed in Allan Kaprow’s “Happenings.” She joined the New York Mycological Society, where she met luminaries like composer John Cage and artist, historian, and organizer George Maciunas. Along with those two, she was a founding member of the Fluxus movement, participating in its first performance in 1962 alongside artists like Nam June Paik as the only woman in the group.
Newspaper clipping depicting Alison Knowles performing “The Big Book” (1967) (photo 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 founded Something Else Press, which published intermedia book art meant to be broadly accessible. There, she would design and co-edit John Cage’s Notations (1969), a book of music manuscripts. (She and Higgins divorced in 1970.)
Alison Knowles (center) performing “Make a salad” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, on October 24, 1962 (photo courtesy Hannah Higgins)
She continued to experiment with the form in individual works, such as large-scale installations like “The Boat Book” (1979), in which “readers” could walk through pages, and works like “Bean Rolls” (1963) — a favored material for their affordability and universality — which reconstituted everyday items into books. She turned pages into instruments and worked with master papermaker Coco Gordon to create a book in which sections correspond to parts of the body (Loose Pages, 1983).
Knowles took up Event Scores, the participatory performance form devised by George Brecht, and would go on to produce more than 100 of these works. Among her most iconic are “Make a Salad” (1962), “The Identical Lunch” (1960), and “Newspaper Music” (1962). The first, originally conceived at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, consists only of its title directive, leaning on performers to interpret and enact it.
“It was our own way of scoring our actions or performances in a manner as serious as a score by Satie,” she told the New York Times in 2022. “A sentence like ‘Make a salad,’ that’s the event score.”
Alison Knowles, “The House of Dust” (1967/2021) (photo by Wolfgang Günzel via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
She was also credited for co-creating what is now considered one of the world’s first computer-generated poems with composer James Tenney. “The House of Dust” (1967), made in an early programming language on an IBM computer, will be restaged as part of the New Museum’s inaugural exhibition for its reopening.
Her work is held in major collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Tate Modern in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Knowles will be remembered for her radical interventions in form, her emphasis on the poetry in the physical world, and her insistence on art as a lived form. As the artist put it in a 2011 interview, art, for her, “was about having an excuse to get to talk to people, to notice everything that happened, to pay attention.”
