GalleristNY » Alison Knowles

Alison Knowles’s Earth Day Salad Needed More Dressing

Dan Duray — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 14:09:04 -0400

Ms. Knowles at the Tate Modern in 2008. (Courtesy aknowles.com)

Capital New York has a write-up of Fluxus great Alison Knowles's recent performance of Make a Salad at the High Line this past Earth Day.

Here's an excerpt:

Among the artist's other event scores are "Shoes of Your Choice," which involves members of the audience coming up to a microphone and describing a pair of shoes, and "Child Art Piece" in which a child is led onto a stage by a parent and then allowed to behave however he or she wishes; the performance ends once the child decides to leave the stage.

"You wouldn't guess the things that could happen!" Knowles exclaimed when we spoke the day before the High Line event, discussing her experience staging the child event score, which debuted at the Fluxus Festival at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf in 1963. "The child could sit down. The child could start to cry. The child could run off the stage. The child could go up to the front and look at the audience and wave." Unfortunately, she was only able to stage that particular piece a few times, because of what she described as "bureaucracy." Children "four years or younger," she said wearily, are "not allowed on the stage. The mother has to sign papers."

Alison Knowles Will Make a Salad For Earth Day at High Line

Dan Duray — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 15:34:41 -0400

Ms. Knowles at the Tate (Photo courtesy of artsandecology.org.uk)

Performance artist Alison Knowles will stage her landmark Fluxus score Make a Salad at the High Line on April 22 to commemorate Earth Day.

First staged in Baltimore, in 1962, Make a Salad was a famous score in which Ms. Knowles did just what the title dictated, and in large quantities, for her audience. Since then it's been repeated in other venues, usually for art historical purposes, notably at the Tate Modern in 2008.

From the press release:

“Alison Knowles is an influential figure in contemporary art and in the world of performance,” said Cecilia Alemani, the Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Curator and Director of High Line Art. “I look forward to re-staging her legendary work for the first time in a public space in New York City. The performance will unite the playfulness of a great artist with the joy of sharing a communal meal at a breathtaking location on the High Line.”

The piece begins at 10:00 a.m. and goes until 1:00 p.m. The release also mentions that, earlier in the month, the High Line will install a new sound installation by Uri Aran called Untitled (Good and Bad) that has affected voices reading names of animals from the plant beds between 25th and 26th Streets.

We Know Nothing: Performance Artists Discuss ‘Belief’ at Location One

Whitney Kimball — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:24:48 -0400

Bonnie Marranca, Gregory Whitehead, Alison Knowles, George Quasha and Lenora Champagne. (Photo courtesy Location One).

"What if art is the natural condition of [man], and everything else has gotten in its way?” asked multimedia artist and poet George Quasha near the close of a panel discussion on Tuesday night at SoHo nonprofit Location One. He was joking, but the laughter in the modestly sized audience seemed to be a collective acknowledgement of an “ah-ha” moment.

In a darkened gallery in the space, a spotlit panel of four sharp and humbly-attired performance art luminaries--George Quasha, Alison Knowles, Gregory Whitehead, and Lenora Champagne--read essays on the amorphous subject of "belief" from the most recent issue of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. The panel was moderated by co-founder and editor of PAJ Bonnie Marranca.

Each of the panelists first read his or her essay with almost uniformly monastic calm. One of the founding members of Fluxus, the soft-spoken, white-haired Alison Knowles, reflected on a lifetime of shocking audiences with everyday experience:

“I think [the actions of the everyday] is where belief exists for every one... whether it’s going to work or baking bread, the belief is there that we’re doing something toward our whole life. My belief is that every person who gets up and goes into their day and does their work is coming from some unrecognized belief system that maybe they’ve picked up as a five-year-old, or they don’t look at it anymore. But to address that and work with it is powerful.”

The rest of the panelist concurred with that assessment. Mr. Quasha, who looks something like a fatherly version of Sterling Ruby, mentioned that “self-generating experience has its own intelligence.” Ms. Champagne, a discreet-looking performance artist and writer--with a salt-and-pepper bob, round glasses and a black velvet blazer--said quietly that she believes in the power of art to help people cope with and shape their reality. Gregory Whitehead, a radio playwright and documentary essayist in a checkered vest, said eh believes in the community that radio creates.

On their specifics of their beliefs, though, the artist-writers ventured into remarkably different territories, prompting a female audience member to note that “artists are reluctant to show a commitment to a certain set of values in an artwork.” She wondered aloud, “What’s the other side of that?”

Mr. Whitehead replied that artists and the art community pays a price for those varied beliefs. “Marginalized, censored... profoundly disrespected... all of this is there, awaiting you if you dare extend outside the prevailing norms," he argued. "I absolutely, one hundred percent affirm that this will and does happen... but this is what we have to do.” This aroused a warm, and deep, collective nod; it was clear that he was preaching to the choir.

And the margins can sometimes become the center, added Ms. Marranca, who has spent nearly four decades working in performance art, which was until recently a rather obscure field. “I have lived to see many of the [performers and composers] who were marginalized [booed offstage, and laughed at by critics] become the mainstay of what we now know is performance history. So that’s the kind of revenge I see.”

Ms. Champagne argued that today “you have people not participating, not voting, not expressing anger...[without blind belief] it’s harder to think that one person can make a difference.”

This sentiment--that religious radicals have permanently hijacked the public stage, making firm political beliefs and commitment hopeless--sounded a bit like typical Bush-era dispair. But there was also some optimism on hand. Mr. Quasha chimed, “I think the Occupy Movement has learned incredibly from the kind of art that [Ms. Marranca] has represented all this time. What’s great about Occupy Museums"--the group that has been staging demonstrations at area museums--"is that you can’t figure out what they believe in.” He thumped his fist on the table. “That’s real anarchy!” This may have summed up the tone of the night: a total conviction in, even a celebration of, uncertainty.

Click here to watch the full video of the Jan 24 panel.