Object Poems

Alison Knowles
New York, New York

Packet with Found Whistle

“The metal speaker was discovered in Springfield Massachusetts by Exit 11 off of Interstate 91 South. It was waiting in the parking lot of New England Orthopedic Hospital and was inadvertently kicked with a sneaker on approximately March 21, 2011. The resulting sound drew a small crowd. A few days later the metal speaker was housed in a handmade red felt eyeglass case obtained as a freebie from a book store in Northampton Massachusetts. The object and case were delivered to Alison Knowles on Sunday, August 28, 2011 in Easthampton Massachusetts during Hurricane Irene.” (Joshua Selman)

Small metal object for whistling, in red fabric eyeglass case. 2011. Unique.

NFS  

About the Artist

A homesteader in the 1950s on Canal Street and Broadway, Fluxus artist Alison Knowles was an integral part of the downtown New York artist community that would become SoHo. By the early 1960s, Knowles was active with the circle of neighborhood artists associated with Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Pop Art, and Happenings. By 1962, a group of these friendships coalesced as Fluxus, whose founding tour brought the Event type of instructional performance to Europe, and later to Asia and the United States.

Since 1964, Knowles has made large and small experimental books. The Bean Rolls (1964) consists of a handheld, canned book of pages (actually small scrolls) of bean lore and information. At a larger scale and rendered as a unique object, Knowles’ The Big Book (1967) offered participants a walk-in book construction, with 8-ft. tall pages, moving around a center spine, permitting the viewer/reader to go inside the sequence of environments. Knowles has continued her examination of books at various scales, including a walk-through Book of Bean (1983) and, for the hand, The Finger Book of Ancient Language, a book in Braille and other tactile languages intended for the blind reader (1987). Recently, the book has shed its spine as Knowles produces body-scaled, free-hanging pages that form books without a unifying spine. Since 2009, these large pages have appeared alongside “pages” reduced to a mere thread. These Event Threads consist of found objects (material events), often dipped in paper, hanging loosely from a single, suspended thread.

The renewed international interest in performance and ephemera brought Knowles to the Tate Long Weekend in London, where her event score Make a Salad drew a record audience of 3000 people in 2008. In January 2009 she exhibited and performed every week with her invented instrument, the Bean Turner, during The 3rd Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989 at the Guggenheim Museum. During the Winter and Spring of 2011, Knowles could be found at MoMA serving up her Identical Lunch (1969), “a tuna fish sandwich on whole wheat toast with lettuce and butter, no mayo, and a cup of soup or a glass of buttermilk.” Knowles’ work has been increasingly featured in benchmark exhibitions including In the Spirit of Fluxus (Walker Art Center, 1992), Out of Actions (LA MOCA, 1998), The American Century (Whitney Museum, 2000), The 3rd Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989 (Guggenheim Museum, 2009), and Selections from the Permanent Collection (MoMA, 2010–2011). Knowles continues to exhibit regularly, with solo shows at Caterina Gualco Gallery (Genoa, Italy), and in New York City at The Drawing Center (2002), Miguel Abreu (2009), and James Fuentes (2011).