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Home , Alison Knowles, Charlie Morrow, Nam June Paik, Womanhouse

JAMES FUENTES 55 Delancey Street New York, NY 10002 (212) 577-1201 [email protected]

Nicole L. Woods Some visits later I arrived at his door with eleven color swatches…[Duchamp] chose one and set it aside on the buffet. After lunch, his wife Teeny picked up Object/Poems: the swatch and said, “Oh Marcel, when did you do this?” He smiled, took a pen- ’s cil and signed the swatch. The following year Marcel died. Arturo Schwarz wrote Feminist me suggesting I had the last readymade. Teeny and Richard Hamilton assured me Archite(x)ture that I did not, but that I had a piece of interesting memorabilia.4

You see you have to get right into it, as This brief experience with one of the most you do with any good book, and you must prolific and influential artists of the twen- become involved and experience it your- tieth century was but one of many chance self. Then you will know something and encounters that would characterize Knowles’s feel something. Let us say that it provides artistic practice for more than four decades. a milieu for your experience but what you The experience of seeing the readymade pro- bring to it is the biggest ingredient, far cess up close served to reaffirm her sense of more important than what is there. the exquisite possibilities of unintentional —Alison Knowles 1 choices, artistic and otherwise. Indeed, Knowles’s chance-derived practice throughout the 1960s and 1970s consistently sought to The world of objects is a kind of book, in frame a collection of sensorial data in vari- which each thing speaks metaphorically ous manifestations: from language-based of all others…and is read with the whole notational scores and to objet body, in and through the movements and trouvé experiments within her lived spaces, displacements which define the space of computer-generated poems, and large-scale objects as much as they are defined by it. installation works. —Pierre Bourdieu 2 For Knowles, the formation of her multi- media practice was a fortuitous and unlikely In 1967, American artist Alison Knowles was outcome of her artistic training. Having spent invited several times to ’s several years studying abstract painting with New York apartment to collaborate on a proj- Adolf Gottlieb at Pratt Institute, trying to ect entitled Cœurs Volants with the famed perfect her own trademark of expression- provocateur and the experimental poet ism, Knowles would eventually reject the . A photograph from one of Abstract Expressionist ethos of existential their meetings shows the artists in a state of suffering and embrace a way of approaching mutual concentration. While Duchamp studi- art (influenced by and Duchamp) ously looks on, Knowles is seen leaning just that found enormous aesthetic potential in over his shoulder, casually holding a lit ciga- the everyday world. This trajectory of chance- rette in her right hand and carefully flipping based work formally commenced in 1962, through colored paper samples of the fly- five years prior to meeting Duchamp, when ing hearts image she recreated for the cover Knowles was actively engaged in the found- of Williams’s book of poems, Sweethearts.3 ing of , one of the most significant Decades later, Knowles would vividly recall and innovative groups of visual artists, poets, their exchange, making a point to note the composers, and musicians to emerge from Alison Knowles and Marcel Duchamp, New York, 1967. arbitrary, even comical, nature of the final the ashes of post-WWII Western Europe Photo by Bill Wilson. Courtesy of selection process: and North America. As an original Fluxus Alison Knowles.

6 ¡ ¡ 7 Alison Knowles, The Big Book, member, and the only female among its early century-old suggestion by French symbol- 1967–69. Mixed media environment. ranks, Knowles was pivotal in developing a ist Stéphane Mallarmé that a book-in-a-box Photo by Peter Moore © Estate of notion of artistic labor that relied on uncon- could have parts as well as lines.”5 Taking Peter Moore/VAGA, NYC. ventional materials and uncommon strate- careful note of the imaginative nature of gies in fusing the bridge between art and The Big Book’s concept and construction, he life. Like their contemporaries in Neo-Dada, concluded that the “permissiveness” inher- Assemblage, and Pop art, the contributions by ent in the discursive space it opened up was Fluxus artists to the history of cultural pro- potentially “just what Marshall McLuhan’s duction are unquestionable. Even among an post-literate man needs to revive his interest impressive roster of avant-gardists, Knowles in printed matter. Freed from the linearity of has always been a unique, if underappreci- type and the one-at-a-time strictures of pages ated, voice precisely for the ways in which bound together, the book is again a contempo- she expanded the field of chance procedures rary medium.” 6 Taken collectively, the book- beyond even experimental borders. works reoriented the domain of publishing and the very concepts of narrative, time, and Within this context, I would like to reconsider experience. Yet what was so inherently radical two large-scale projects Knowles developed in or permissive about Knowles’s piece? Devoting the late 1960s/early 1970s—The Big Book and more critical space in his summary to The the House of Dust—that independently merged Big Book than to the work of any other artist, the forms of installation with , Junker’s jaunty description provided a hint: technology, and poetry into a large-scale investigation of the spacio-temporal condi- 8 feet tall, weight about a ton, equipped tions of reading and living. One of my aims with telephone, toilet, hot plate, art gal- is to consider how the works modeled a new lery, graffiti wall and—for the utmost in form of spectatorship using spaces/metaphors reading pleasure—a 4-foot sleeping tun- of the home to foreground certain political nel lined with artificial grass. Blinking questions arising out of the nascent femi- lights, a tape collage and a film complete nist art movement. Here, the critical terms of with the visual impact of this eight-page Knowles’s Fluxus practice—indeterminacy, the volume…The Big Book is, of course, not event-score, and performance—were extended really a book. It is something else, liter- to include a consideration of the physical and ally a book-world.7 metaphorical use of the built environment and the ways in which ideas and experiences about In Junker’s view, the multimedia environment the home in the postwar era were tacitly gen- Knowles created was not a “subversive” rede- dered and critiqued. sign of the traditional book format, but rather a “book-world,” and one, in fact, that would The Big Book meet an urgent need.

“It’s the book we’ve all been waiting for.” So In 1967, Alison Knowles was pictured on the declared critic Howard Junker on the pages of first floor of her Chelsea brownstone, stand- Newsweek magazine in spring 1968 of Alison ing on a ladder with her arms outstretched Knowles’s large-scale installation, The Big and carefully moving one of those oversized Book (1967). Tracing a chain of book-inspired rectangular “pages” of The Big Book.8 The art projects from Marcel Duchamp’s Boite-en- methodical and monumental work consumed Valise (1935–41) to the avant-garde publish- her for almost a year; she conceived of it as ing activities of Fluxus and Aspen magazine, a continuation and in many ways a synthe- Howard approvingly compared Knowles’s sis of her performance pieces and objects of work to the experimental efforts of liter- the early to mid-1960s. The Big Book was a ary : “[Her] radical reshaping of veritable text-world and mixed media project the book format is only the latest effort in that incorporated original silkscreen prints, an iconoclastic tradition dating back to the papers, various found images, and mirrors,

8 ¡ ¡ 9 “She’s Close in Something That’s which were framed in wood and mounted various states of isolated movement (bending, Far Out” (Alison Knowles with The on casters around a steel spine. A steplad- twisting, standing, and jumping). With the Big Book [1967–69], Museum of der affixed to the outside of the structure inclusion of these images, The Big Book Contemporary Art, Chicago), 1967. supplied the viewer/reader with a tool for recalled the motion studies and photographic AP Wirephoto. © Alison Knowles. climbing in and out of windows. The multi- technologies that helped visualize and paneled environment was wired for sound reorganize notions of time and duration in with an electronic tape system that provided the nineteenth century. Following Knowles’s ambient and “empathetic tones.”9 The penchant for design, the photographs were construction also included actual items and scattered non-sequentially and pasted, almost spaces for living: a working kitchen, a tele- decoratively, over the door/walled surfaces.11 phone and electrical system with small col- One early viewer/reader of The Big Book noted ored and flashing lights, a library with books the “ever-present naked gentlemen whose and a typewriter, a gallery with commissioned changing gestures ape one’s own” as one artworks by Higgins, , and oth- crawled, bent, stooped, or stood in and around ers, and an artificial grass tunnel that could the pages.12 double as a garden and a bed. The Big Book contained a chemical toilet but no formalized Knowles published The Big Book with Higgins waste system or disposal system—a slightly under their collaborative publishing house anarchic gesture that hinted at the relative , and it was exhibited for impracticality and ultimately utopian possi- a time in the Something Else Gallery, located bilities of actually dwelling in the space. on the first floor of their New York home. In 1968, Knowles was invited to exhibit The Big To access The Big Book, the viewer/reader Book in Europe for the Frankfurt Buchmesse, was directed through signs and arrows toward with subsequent stops in New York, Chicago, specific zones for entering and exiting. Despite and Toronto.13 Negotiating the tricky eleva- the moving vertical frames that acted as both tions where Knowles placed the ladder, tun- doors and windows, the book cover, or portal nel, and windows, independent writer and for admission, was a hole surrounded by critic Bill Wilson noted, in his review of the lights located at the bottom of the first page. work in Art in America, how difficult it was Activating and engaging The Big Book required to actually inhabit the space and implied that a certain flexibility and dexterity; one had to a key feature of the work’s achievement is crawl through the circular void to get to the the projection of an imaginative dwelling.14 second page. This sense of physical motility In another article, published by sometimes was magnified as the viewer/reader continued Fluxus artist , Wilson described to navigate through the book environment, his physical encounter with The Big Book: as each successive page consisted of tall and wide doors roughly eight-feet high by four- After wiggling through the tunnel, one feet wide.10 They were not, as one might enters the apartment, an illusionless reality, reasonably expect of a book, made of paper a world without artifice, the unpreten- but rather of two kinds of bonded sheeting, tious Manhattan living-loft of the 1950’s transparent and opaque, which hinted at what and 60’s. This underworld, such as an would be revealed on either side. Some of epic hero usually enters, presents the the framed sheets were subsequently covered processes of life nonchalantly, without with paint and penciled murals, collaged bits varnish, for acceptance. The acceptance and scraps of paper, and most intriguingly, leads (led me) through the window of the a series of Eadweard Muybridge chrono- apartment and up a short ladder, which photographs from his human motion studies I read to mean that when the apartment (1887), which Knowles had silkscreened as was felt to be sufficient, it ceased to negative and positive images directly onto the be an underworld and became a means wooden supports. The appropriated Muybridge toward elevation. Others who read the images showed male athletes captured in Big Book, who take this journey through

10 ¡ ¡ 11 metaphors, will be on a different quest is unique about The Big Book is Knowles’s use consumed openly by others. By transforming and home—of public and private—revealing and will arrive at different goals, but nec- of the expanded book form (tactile, literary, the ideologically defined domestic space into not only the blandly familiar but the utterly essarily while they are in the Big Book literal object) to dramatize the act of reading a destabilized book-world, Knowles under- strange in reconsideration of the reading expe- they will be as mobile, kinetic, audial, daily life as a social text and an enigmatic mined the spatial integrity of the nuclear rience. This work invites us to act—to perform visual, energetic, and beautiful as it is.15 space of self-reflection. Less of an homage to home and effectively collapsed the complex our potentiality, to re-read our abilities, our a woman’s assumed role as steward or protec- social rituals that are inhabited and reaf- bodies, our spaces, and our narratives. According to Wilson, Knowles played on tor of the home, Knowles’s piece is more akin firmed in its various regions—kitchens, bed- several visual and environmental registers at to that metaphorical “room of one’s own” rooms, etc. In exposing the house itself as The interchangeable elements of The Big once: text and texture; function and space; trope as evocatively described by the writer an object and experience to be read, then, Book’s construction (again, mobile, compli- epic literary fantasies and mundane lived real- Virginia Woolf. Here, the objects Knowles Knowles’s The Big Book is feminist in a con- ant, adjustable) contained a central paradox: ities; and indeterminate experiences, assembled spoke to a deeply personal and crete sense: she affords attention and value to because the entire structure was so heavy, the “different quest[s]” meant to “arrive at differ- specific way of living (her books, her tools) the domestic sphere and the intimate rituals pages could not be collapsed or closed easily. ent goals” for each viewer/reader. In this way, that would enable one to ostensibly survive of reading/living in the delicate threshold of Unlike Marcel Duchamp’s Boite-en-Valise edi- Knowles amplified the process of reading as a in the makeshift home without the support of the everyday by revealing its affects. tions of traveling artworks made in miniature, perceptual and physical event. a man or the structure of a family. Moreover, the object experience presented by Knowles architectural historian Beatriz Colomina has Knowles’s deliberate excavation of the space needed to be stationary in some sense—either Gender Readings argued that new images of domesticity that of the home (her home) monumentalized the experienced privately at home (metaphori- arose in the postwar period had an explic- act of reading for its material and aesthetic cally, again, in a room of one’s own), or as a More important are the ways in which itly nationalist bent that “turned out to be a potential. The readymade environment was playground with the artist’s young daughters Knowles expanded the material possibilities powerful weapon” of democracy that featured called on to destabilize the traditional bound- moving through it,20 or in a gallery space, of indeterminacy toward a critique of gender “expertly designed images of domestic bliss aries of domesticity by providing not only a book fair, or other public exhibition site that as it is experienced spatially. Her project, like [that] were launched to the entire world as real space to be lived in, but also the mobili- required an expenditure of time and leisure. the feminist liberation movement emerging in part of a carefully orchestrated propaganda zation of a “different kind of space”—a space I want to suggest that this play between the late 1960s, materialized from a discursive campaign.”17 In the context of the prolifera- of discursive interaction between the woman mobility (adjustable pages, objects) with rupture with preexisting orders of representa- tion of homemade nuclear fall-out shelters and the house.18 The sounds of labor recorded structural fixity (a container of experience) tion—spatial, textual, aesthetic—that sought of the 1950s and 1960s, and the rise of early by Knowles while constructing the piece might be understood as an implicit critique to reconsider notions of gendered subjectiv- feminist reevaluations of the domestic sphere, (sawing, cutting, nailing of wood, sounds of domestic space that implies more than ity and the social forces (including domestic Knowles’s The Big Book environment seemed of her daughters crying, husband inquiring, the material conditions of living. The Big space) that aided in the process of self-actual- to insinuate the need for isolation, self-suf- etc.) were replayed in an audio loop during Book also implies that the intimate, every- ization. The Cagean notion of indeterminacy ficiency, and an abundance of basic supplies each exhibition, thus giving a sonic substance day rituals of domesticity, in their repetitive was accorded a new framework in which to for living in a moment of personal and politi- and texture to the experience of moving, ordinariness, offer a novel way to read and take sounds as they are heard in real time cal crisis. The Big Book symbolized Knowles’s dwelling, constructing.19 As such, Knowles understand how one comes to know the social and space, and quotidian experience as it is shift from small, handheld objects in her early explored a private economy of means: first, in body. Knowles proposes such a reading in her inhabited in the flesh and enforced by the Fluxus works to large-scale environments that the reminiscence of the textured affect of dif- explanation of the environment: division of labor and production of gender. required more active participation and aware- ferent materials and surfaces; second, in the The collapsing of public and private realms ness of domestic, national, and global anxiet- book’s scale, which defies all means of stable I don’t want to drag the reader through evident in The Big Book points to a radical ies surrounding the home and enacted these topography (both material and physical); and the book simply on my own terms. I want displacement of reading (artistic and literary) realities in an elaborate performance of the third, the texture of reading and knowing [everyone] to see and hear enough of the and architecture (postwar nuclear home) in a book as world. as lived experience. As a result, the merg- pages and their background to know what reconsideration of the structures of interior- ing of architectural space with the zones of it’s really all about.… Maybe having done ity. The viewer/reader is invited to experience As an act of architectural displacement, private interiority and public exhibition links The Big Book is better than going through an artist making plain the female body and Knowles’s The Big Book actualized the refor- biological and social concerns within dense it, but offering it to others as a perfor- the domestication of labor as a text and matting and unfolding of lived domestic space webs of signification. In their most active mance piece is the best I can do.21 performance to be enacted by anyone. into an exteriorized view. The interior was rendering here, the efforts become the graph turned inside out and its daily, private opera- or signature of the feminine body and her Indeed, we can read The Big Book as an In 1963, six years prior to the construction tions were publically revealed. The environ- labor in the architectures of house and body. example of a proto-feminist intervention where of The Big Book, Betty Friedan and other ment was mobile and adaptable (the pages/ Knowles’s articulation in material form of a subjectivity, as constructed by space, disrupts second-wave feminists challenged the institu- walls could be moved and removed), thus kind of reexamination of dwelling implores the boundaries of inside/outside and is thus tionalization of patriarchal authority, and its offering a new sense of the architecture of the viewer to attend to the ways in which the a threat to orders of patriarchal authority in “family romance,”16 as the site in which the the home as book, perhaps, even an adver- space itself is explicitly gendered. What she both the public and private sphere. The large, home acted as a unified familial order. What tisement of a person’s life to be read and stages for us is a reconfiguration of hearth methodically constructed, assisted readymade

12 ¡ ¡ 13 Alison Knowles, The Big Book, 1967–69. Mixed media environment. undermined the categorical nature of art In 1967, while assembling objects for The California Institute of the Arts Library (and by extension “woman’s art”) by includ- Big Book, Knowles was also participating in Visual Resource Collection. ing a variety of sources crossing medium and an informal workshop on digitized language aesthetic boundaries in an atypical ensemble systems and computer mainframes orga- that expanded architectural and perceptual nized by the composer , who space. Knowles’s readymade was not rendered was a mutual friend of Knowles and John dysfunctional by a deliberate obfuscation of Cage. Over the course of several Thursday use-value and exchange, but differenced by the evenings in the living room of Knowles’s procedures in which we conceive of the work as Chelsea home, Tenney introduced a group a bridge between art and life. It did not, then, of artists and musicians, including Knowles, as Helen Molesworth has argued of Duchamp’s Cage, Higgins, , and Steve readymades, resist its “intended, mandated, Reich, to the rich potential of blurring the standardized use” or “resist the working sub- boundaries between visuality, poetry, musi- ject,” 22 but rather offered an extended expe- cal notation, engineering, and computer pro- rience of the working body in the physical gramming. A resident at Bell Laboratories in exertion it took to interact with the installa- New Jersey and an expert on the IBM compil- tion—squatting, contorting, standing, climbing, ing system known as FORTRAN,25 Tenney and turning the pages of the book in multiple conceived of the workshop as a simple dem- arrangements depending on purpose, partici- onstration of the methods in which comput- pant, and need. ers could be used as a tool of artistic practice. Demystifying the complexity of technocratic Here Knowles reinterpreted her being-in-the- language and application, Tenney’s goal was world through the lived experience of the rather modest: to show the artists that their everyday and called our attention to the way in previous experimentations with indetermi- which the domestic sphere is implicitly drama- nacy in fact “often resembled the way one tized. In 1967, after viewing the work along- programmed information.”26 Stimulated by side ’s installation Words (1962) this creative environment, Knowles began at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, to conceive of a basic poetic structure in the critic Harold Rosenberg observed that which random bits of information fed into a Knowles effectively offered the viewer/reader machine could streamline her experiments “a physical metaphor that literally contains with chance-derived imagery. The result was everything. It is the story of the artist’s life “The House of Dust”—a digital poem com- presented through copious examples of her posed of four separate categories prepared domestic and cultural surroundings; it is both by Knowles in advance and programmed individual and collective.”23 Indeed, in The Big in FORTRAN-IV by Tenney, which was Book Knowles opened up the site of domestic- then processed by a mainframe computer at ity to all viewers/readers by emphasizing labor Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute (BPI). The in which each performer, entrant, and viewer refrain of the poem followed the formulation experiences a highly individuated and personal “A house of…,” with each category indicating encounter with the text. the materials, locations, lighting, and inhabit- ants of a house in a series of repeatable qua- House of Dust trains (four-line verse). The four lists created by Knowles were then subjected to chance The most important thing to emphasize and random mixing by the computer’s inter- is the changing nature of the poem.… nal logic. The results were often fascinatingly [It] is about dwellings, types of people absurd, humorous, and evocative. For exam- and situations that sometimes do and ple, one set of permutations read: sometimes don’t get together. —Alison Knowles 24

14 ¡ ¡ 15 Figure 4.5: Alison Knowles with A House of Dust Using Natural Light / Inhabited by People James Tenney, “The House of 31 In Michigan from all Walks of Life. It was remarkable Dust,” 1968. Computer printout of Using Natural Light that Knowles would choose spatial, domestic poem. The Getty Research Institute, Inhabited by Vegetarians architectural, elemental, and environmental Los Angeles. (even climatic) materials for her poem com- A House of Roots position, given that the computer program By a River used to construct the original poem, clas- Using Natural Light sical FORTRAN, had been crucial for han- Inhabited by People Who Sleep dling computationally intensive areas, such as Very Little numerical weather prediction, finite element analysis, and fluid dynamics.32 In the appli- A House of Sand cation materials for the prize, Knowles pro- Among Other Houses posed a public works project to be situated in Using Electricity the Chelsea district near her home. A friend Inhabited by People Who Love to Read of Knowles, William N. Berger, an architect and teacher of aesthetics at Pratt Institute, A House of Leaves spent eight months assisting her in the devel- In a Metropolis opment stages and successfully managed to Using All Available Lighting see the blueprints through the Inhabited by All Races of Men Building Department. Securing a permit for Represented Wearing Predominantly an acre of land between 28th Street and 8th Red Clothing 27 Avenue, it was decided that the precise loca- tion for Knowles’s “home for the houses” When Tenney first ran it at BPI, he reported would be the Penn South Housing Co-op, back to Knowles that almost a thousand qua- funded by the International Ladies Garment trains were generated before a single quatrain Workers Union. The director of ILGWU, of verse repeated. The total poem apparently Henry Marguiles, approved the design and runs for a quarter mile of computer printout,28 convinced the board members of the co-op producing “a perpetually shifting set of mutual to place two huge fiberglass domes on its and modular relationships” among the mate- lawn. The smaller dome, which was the first rial and “poetic choices” of the artist’s many quatrain of the poem and weighed a total of lists.29 Unlike Knowles’s paintings in the late two tons, was fabricated from plans Knowles 1950s that used the I-Ching for color place- designed at the George Krier foundry in ment,30 the chance-derived structure of “The Philadelphia. That same year, Knowles began House of Dust” was not predicated or pro- to work on its façade, collecting and adher- duced by a throw of dice but rather through ing objects she had found in the surround- the construction provided by a technological ing streets to its rough limestone exterior apparatus. The use of FORTRAN-IV as the shell. The computerized printout of the poem interface between visual and poetic content was programmed to aid in the further evolu- was thus an important and innovative choice, tion by taking elements from the poetic text since this particular computer language was (home, materials, lighting) and determining known for its flexibility and modularity in its structural coordinates. When the location providing for compilations favored in the was fixed, Knowles then commissioned Max organization of libraries, indices, and other Neuhaus to add ambient sound and light to assemblage systems of information. the environment. He chose thermal circuits sensitive to sunlight.33 In 1968, Alison Knowles won a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship to transform one While working outdoors at the co-op, Knowles quatrain of the original “The House of Dust” encountered growing resistance and resentment computer poem into a large outdoor sculp- from the tenants, whose apartment windows ture: A House of Plastic / In a Metropolis / had a clear view of the House of Dust structure.

16 ¡ ¡ 17 Many were unmoved by its status as public commissioned Neuhaus to add sound to the art and instead took it as an affront to their smaller of the two houses. Neuhaus chose privacy and considered it a “disturbance of thermal circuits that were sensitive to thermal the peace.”34 Knowles met with the director and solar changes and thus “would pick up and co-op members to discuss participation the path of the sun moving over the HOUSE with the object by “children and artists” liv- each day and would change that heat into ing in the building, but disgruntled tenants sound for the people sitting inside.” 39 In a let- organized protests and walking petitions. Part ter dated from 1977, Knowles recalled how the of the polemical nature of their resistance had small house with “electric eyes” was the perfect to do with the fact that House of Dust had no spot to host film screenings with her students. recognizable taxonomy or designation; they simply did not know what to call it or how to This sense of participation was a key dif- interact with it.35 Indeed, as Knowles recalled: ference in the House of Dust iteration at the “There’s quite a difference between a sculp- CalArts campus. Often lacking office space tor doing outdoor pieces for a decade or more at her new post, Knowles conceived of the and a visual artist doing performance and poem houses as “active” sites for meaning- looking for a place for her three- ful exchanges with students and colleagues.40 ton poem!”36 The frustration reached a boiling The also functioned as alternative point when, in the early morning of October spaces for poetry, music, meditations, perfor- 23, 1969, the gardener of the ILGWU was mances, and in the art and music bribed to drench the house with kerosene and schools. One of the more notable events was throw a torch, effectively destroying the work. the “Poetry Drop Event,” organized at the site A few days later, Knowles received a color pho- by her student, Norman Kaplan. The postcard tograph of the blaze in the mail. The perpetra- announcing the performance read: “Computer tor was never discovered or convicted of arson. Poem Drop: An Event by Norman Kaplan. In shock and disappointment, and fearing the Over the House of Dust: by Alison work was irretrievably damaged, Knowles set Knowles. 1000 feet of poem dropped from the the project aside.37 skies. 2 P.M. May 20, 1971.”41 For this event, another student of Knowles’s, Jeff Raskin, In 1970, when she was invited by Allan contacted a friend at the Jet Propulsion Kaprow and Paul Brach to join the fine arts Laboratory at California Institute of Top to bottom faculty at a new experimental arts campus, Technology (Caltech) and asked him to print Alison Knowles, House of Dust, the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), out a second computerized printout of the 1969–75. Two structures at California Knowles negotiated to have full reign over original poem. The long printout of the com- Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA. Destroyed. Photographer unknown. an acre of ground where she could have the puterized House of Dust poem was dropped © Alison Knowles. ruins of the New York House of Dust moved. from a helicopter over the physical structure, On a patch of green meadow near the tennis with Knowles directing the timing by radio. Alison Knowles, House of Dust, courts, above the Golden State 5 Freeway, A staff reporter from the 1969–75. Film screening at California Knowles used the remaining funds secured who covered the performance took note of Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA. Destroyed. Photographer unknown. from her Guggenheim grant to commission the multifaceted nature of the coterminous © Alison Knowles. two new “object/poems,” this time inspired activities: “As the paper fell on the campus, by the quatrain: A House of Dust / On Open students acted out, symbolically, lines of Alison Knowles, House of Dust, Ground / Using Natural Light / Inhabited by verse.”42 Like many events and happenings at 1969–75. Two structures at California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA. Friends and Enemies.38 Both were larger than the House of Dust, the poem drop captured a Destroyed. Photographer unknown. the original work; one cave-like building pause in the routines of daily life and created © Alison Knowles. (the “large house”) measured twenty-three a space in which new ideas and experiences feet long by twelve feet high, and a simi- were offered and new platforms, sensations, Michael Bell, Meditations at Dawn larly shaped structure (the “small house”) perceptions, and moods were shared. This Event, c. 1971–72, House of Dust, 1969–75. California Institute of was twelve feet long by four feet high. Each sensibility was evident in another perfor- the Arts, Valencia, CA. Destroyed. was fabricated from wood blocks and fiber- mance event by Knowles, known as 99 Red Photographer unknown. © Alison glass sprayed with gray sand. Knowles again North (circa 1971–72). Here, the surrounding Knowles.

18 ¡ ¡ 19 This page and opposite Alison Knowles with Norman Kaplan, Poem Drop Event, May 1971, House of Dust, 1969–75. California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA. Destroyed. Photogra- pher unknown. © Alison Knowles.

20 ¡ ¡ 21 space of the object/poem consisted of ninety- and Knowles was refused a request to partici- One of the things in my life that is Knowles’s art practice, then, is one that care- nine red apples arranged on a colored quad- pate in .48 Despite feeling a deep rewarding for me now is my relation- fully reexamines art as itself a social relation, rant that pointed north.43 Participants were sense of alienation from her female peers, in ships (influence one might say) with an occasion of contingency. It is in these infi- invited to exchange any one of the apples for an interview with her former student, Aviva young women students I had at CalArts— nitely visual, sonic, and textured contexts that an object. Many people left something behind Rahmani, Knowles recalled the stimulating [Barbara] Bloom and [Lisa] Mikulchik— her work reactivates perception at the locus of (e.g., car keys), but many of the apples also environment at CalArts: to see how they live and what they are sensorial experience. Her audience-activated sat in decay for several weeks. As Hannah doing, and that my work and image is environments, sculptures, objects, and events Higgins has observed, the work “initiated I had been working alone, as most very meaningful to them.52 amplify the semantic range where things can an exchange of ideas or experiences, as well did then. It was new and be differenced. as the profoundly social nature of .”44 exciting to work visually along with oth- Conclusion Seen this way, Knowles’s performance work ers. …I hadn’t had access to women of on the CalArts campus continued the artistic that stature. All the artists I had worked I have been arguing that Knowles expanded themes she had been pursuing since the early with were men…[but at CalArts] I found the material possibilities of indeterminacy 1960s: using chance to both assert and sup- women working everywhere. It forced me toward a critique of gender as it is experienced press her own subjective impulses through an to take a harder look at myself and what spatially. Her projects, like the feminist libera- expression of the tenuousness and tedious- my own history had been.49 tion movement emerging in the late 1960s, ness of life as it is lived. By encouraging such materialized from a discursive rupture with an open approach to propositions, perfor- It is important to point out, as Carolee preexisting orders of representation—spatial, mances, objects, and spaces, Knowles consis- Schneemann did in 1991, that there appeared textual, aesthetic—that sought to reconsider tently allowed for the easy slippage of any one to exist no theoretical framework or interpre- notions of gendered subjectivity and the social of us into her place. tive or institutional structure to ground what forces (including domestic space) that aided in Knowles and other women and performance the process of self-actualization. The collaps- In the context of working at CalArts in the artists were doing prior to 1970, “no femi- ing of public and private realms evident in The early 1970s, when the move- nist analysis to redress masculist tradition,” Big Book and House of Dust points to a radical ment was just emerging, Knowles created and certainly “no semiotic or anthropological displacement of reading (artistic and literary) and participated in artistic and environmen- scan of archetypes that could link [women’s] and architecture (postwar nuclear home) in a tal projects that presented new territories visual images.”50 Given Knowles’s aesthetic reconsideration of the structures of interiority. to be explored. The art critic and curator of minimally produced events/environments The viewer/reader is invited to experience an Lucy Lippard described both iterations of premised on the notion of openness where artist making plain the female body and the Knowles’s House of Dust as distinctive for performers/viewers carry out simple tasks, domestication of labor as a text and perfor- their ability to make “stories become true perhaps the struggle between Knowles and mance to be enacted by anyone. occupants of the space.”45 Describing a nar- the FAP was less a sense of what was or was rative component seen in the “fictionalized” not permissible for a woman artist to do, but Rather than instigating a radical break (or and “transformative” space of Womanhouse rather, a matter of taste and preference.51 rupture) with her previous work in Fluxus, (1972)—a month-long installation piece cre- in these multimedia projects, Knowles ated by the students in and Despite her direct “access to feminism for expanded the tropes intrinsic to time-based ’s the first time,” Knowles’s practice was never art practice—movement, memory, duration, (FAP) at CalArts—Lippard noted that “liv- explicitly ideologically motivated, nor was it information, experience, participation, and ing space is an extension of the body, and engaged with the more radicalized movements perception—and productively joined them in biological as well as social experience influ- sweeping the in the postwar polemics surrounding new ideas about space ences a woman’s preoccupations with the era. But a close reexamination of Knowles’s and subjectivity in the late 1960s. In each relationships among outside, entrance, and work reveals how much it did in fact respond instance, the work of artistic practice is char- inside.”46 Indeed, both House of Dust and in feminist ways to many political and social acterized by a set of shifting terms and dia- Womanhouse were important domains of crises. In other words, while Knowles was not lectical procedures: immediate and measured, activity for artistic, feminist, and student- a part of the overtly feminist educational pro- public and private, literal and metaphorical, generated happenings and performances in gram at CalArts, she was nevertheless actively practical and imaginative, modest and con- Los Angeles. Since Chicago and Schapiro engaged in its nascent political consciousness. fident, intelligent and humorous. The scale, Nicole L. Woods is a visiting lecturer of modern and famously favored a women-only admissions Knowles took great pleasure and satisfaction in sensation, texture, and affect of her installa- contemporary art at the University of California, Irvine. She is currently working on a book entitled Alison Knowles, 47 the 1970s from her work with women art stu- tions demonstrated how objects perceive and policy in the FAP, and Knowles opened her Fluxus, and the Enigmatic Work of Postwar Art, and a second classes to all students, many of whom were dents. In a letter to her then-ex-husband Dick are perceived in that delicate residue of human project on food in contemporary art practice. This essay is male, frictions existed between the artists, Higgins, dated August 11, 1974, she wrote: experience that seeks to make life meaningful. dedicated to the memory of James Woods.

22 ¡ ¡ 23 Notes

1 Alison Knowles, letter to Emmett The House of Dust,” New Wilderness originally appeared in “Museum of 35 This reaction to public art is, of course, 48 According to Knowles, she felt alienated Williams, Jean Brown Papers, The Newsletter 17 (May 1980), 22. the New,” The New Yorker (November not unique to Knowles. For more on from the FAP, Chicago, and Schapiro, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. 12 Emmett Williams, “The Big Book of 18, 1967), 224–35. The exhibition in the antimonies of public art projects, as well as some of the female faculty 2 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, Alison Knowles,” 10. Emmett Williams Chicago was entitled Pictures to Be see Miwon Kwon, “Sitings of Public in general, because she was known trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Correspondence File, Jean Brown Seen/Poems to Be Read. Art: Integration Versus Intervention,” for “working with men.” Interview Stanford University Press, 1990), 76. Papers, The Getty Research Institute, 24 Alison Knowles and , One Place After Another: Site-Specific with the author, November 2009. 3 Emmett Williams, Sweethearts (New Los Angeles. Williams also noted “A Dialogue: The House of Dust,” Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, 49 Aviva Rahmani, “Alison Knowles: York: The Something Else Press, 1967). that “cookies in the shape of the New Wilderness Newsletter 17 (May MA: MIT Press, 2004), 56–99. An Interview,” M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An 4 “Notes Toward an Indigo Island: A Con- ever-present naked gentlemen” were 1980), 21. 36 Knowles, “The House of Dust: A Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory, versation Between Alison Knowles found in the kitchen next to coffee, 25 The name FORTRAN is an acronym Chronicle,” 22. and Criticism, ed. and Mira and ,” Indigo Island: headache remedies, and cigarettes. for FORmula TRANslating System— 37 Alison Knowles, interview with the Schor (Durham, NC, and London: Artworks by Alison Knowles, texts 13 Touring sites included: Kunsthalle, a computer program invented at IBM author, December 2007, New York Duke University Press, 2000), 364. In by Hannah Higgins, Alison Knowles, ; Nikolaj Kirche, Copenhagen; (International Business Machines) City. The remains were shipped by the course of the interview, Rahmani Bernd Schulz, and (Saa- and The Jewish Museum, New York. It in 1957 that quickly became a vital flatbed truck back to Philadelphia and tells Knowles of the important men- rbrücken, : Stadtgalerie Saar- eventually made a stop in San Diego structure for the early evolution of re-dipped in fiberglass. torship she provided, calling her the brücken, 1995), 101–02. Since Knowles before falling apart from the ravages compiling technology (now seen in 38 The chanced-derived nature of the “most supportive” of all her teachers made and owned the printed swatches, of travel and poor packing by various C++ and Java software). poem created the possibility of at CalArts. she later silkscreened the image over exhibiting venues. 26 Philip Corner (with Larry Polansky), multiple manifestations in physical 50 , “The Obscene t-shirts and sold them at various art 14 Wilson, “The Big Book,” 100–03. “Delicate Computations,” form (e-mail exchange with Knowles, Body/Politic,” Art Journal 50.4 (Winter auctions. Alison Knowles, conversation 15 Wilson, Dé-coll/age 6. Perspectives of New Music, 25.1–2, May 2012). 1991), 31. with the author, December 15, 2006, 16 Sigmund Freud, “Family Romances,” 25th Anniversary Issue (Winter–Sum- 39 Knowles, “The House of Dust: A 51 In chapter two of my dissertation, New York City. Collected Papers 5, ed. James mer 1987), 473. Chronicle,” 17. I discuss this distinction further by 5 Howard Junker, “Pandora’s Book,” Strachey (London: Hogarth Press 27 Knowles has been invited to recite the 40 Ibid., 18. The House of Dust sculptures detailing how Knowles changed cer- Newsweek, (April 29, 1968), 88. The and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, poem many times. Most recently, in were also mentioned in a short Rolling tain performance features of a score review is accompanied by a black-and- [1909] 1952), 74–78. May 2011, she performed “House of Stone article, dated April 1972, on written for her by another Fluxus white photograph by Robert R. McElroy 17 Beatriz Colomina, Domesticity at War Dust” and other works at A Celebra- multimedia artist Dana Atchley, the artist, Nam June Paik, in Serenade of Knowles standing in front of The (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 12. tion of American Poetry, hosted by author/editor of Space-Atlas, Notebook for Alison (1962–63) by refusing Big Book, with a caption that reads: 18 Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the the White House (http://www.youtube. One (1969–71). In 1972, Atchley was an the score’s instruction to undress. “Knowles: Reshaping the book for post- Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real com/watch?v=-68Z708lFsY). artist-in-residence at California College Similarly, as Kristine Stiles has literate man.” Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 28 A small edition of twenty-one pages of of the Arts in Oakland, California, noted, Knowles did not participate 6Ibid. 2001), 157. the computer printout, run off by the where he proposed relocating the in another work dedicated to her by 7Ibid. 19 Around the time of its construction, Siemens 4004 in 1969, was packaged sculptures and using the area around Nam June Paik, entitled Chronicle of a 8 The American photographer Peter Knowles also created a short film of in plastic sheeting with a silkscreen Knowles’s “poem-in-progress” for Beautiful Princess (1962), which called Moore took the photographs I have The Big Book in her studio. Providing a label and published in Cologne by events, installations, and happenings. for “a woman to stain the flags of been describing, in which Knowles variety of perspectives, from extreme Kaspar König. Now a collector’s item, 41 Postcard advertising the event ad- selected world nations ‘with [her] own is dwarfed by the installation’s height close-up to wide-angle, both Knowles one edition is located at The Getty dressed to Emmett Williams from monthly blood’ and...expose [herself] and weight. Several of these installa- and her then-husband Research Institute, Los Angeles. Alison Knowles, Jean Brown Papers, in a beautiful gallery.” Knowles tion shots taken by Moore would later are shown walking in and working 29 Hannah Higgins, The Grid Book The Getty Research Institute, Los shared with certain illustrate an article on Knowles for Art through the environment. A later (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 249. Angeles. misgivings about the expressionistic in America by the independent writer filmed version shows her then-young 30 For more on Knowles’s early paintings, 42 “Campus Poetry Drop,” photo-caption nature of Paik’s pieces and, thus, her and critic Bill Wilson, in the summer daughter, Jessica Higgins, experienc- see the first chapter of my disertation, of the performance, Los Angeles objections were on aesthetic grounds, of 1968. ing and “reading” the book as well. Performing Chance: Alison Knowles, Times, May 22, 1971, Times Photos, not necessarily moral ones. Alison 9 I have relied on the artist’s papers, Viewing selections of the film has Fluxus, and the Enigmatic Work of Art, SF10. Knowles, interview with the author, photographs, and personal recollec- been crucial to my understanding University of California, Irvine, 2010. 43 See Hannah Higgins’s “The Media Are November 2009. See also: Kristine tions to describe details of the work, as of the work and its meaning. A copy 31 Alison Knowles, “House of Dust His- the Messages: An Introduction to Stiles, “Between Water and Stone, well as several contemporary accounts, of the film is located in the Alison tory,” typed summary dated 1981, Alison Knowles’s House of Dust,” in Fluxus Performance: A Metaphysics including two unpublished but formal Knowles Studio Archive, New York Alison Knowles Studio Archive, New Muse in the Mainframe, ed. Douglas of Acts,” In the Spirit of Fluxus, ed. essays written by the artist and poet City. York City. Kahn and Hannah Higgins, forthcom- Elizabeth Armstrong and Joan Emmett Williams, located in the Jean 20 Interestingly, Knowles resisted specific 32 Michael Kupferschmid, Classical ing from the University of California Rothfuss (Minneapolis, MN: Walker Brown Papers at The Getty Research signs of motherhood within the book- FORTRAN: Programming for Engineer- Press. My thanks to Hannah Higgins Art Center, 1993), 62–99. Institute; and two reviews: Bill Wilson world she created. The Big Book did ing and Scientific Applications (New for sharing her manuscript with me. 52 Alison Knowles, typed letter to Dick for Wolf Vostell’s Dé-coll/age 6 (July not include objects that related or York: Marcel Dekker, 2002), 15–17. 44 Higgins, “The Media Are the Messages,” Higgins, 1974. Dick Higgins Papers, 1967), unpaginated; and Bill Wilson, identified her explicitly as a mother— 33 For detailed information about the unpaginated. The Getty Research Institute, Los “The Big Book,” Art in America 56.4 even if her young twin daughters were House of Dust sculptures, I have 45 Lucy R. Lippard, “Centers and Frag- Angeles. (July–August 1968), 100–03. invited to interact with the structure relied on archival materials, photo- ments: Women’s Spaces,” Women in 10 Alison Knowles, e-mail exchange with in an elaborate pop-up book environ- graphs, a short film, and multiple American Architecture: A Historic and author, April 9, 2010. ment of learning. interviews with the artist. Contemporary Perspective, ed. Susana 11 A second set of images was of a goat 21 Knowles quoted in Williams, “The Big 34 Alison Knowles, “The House of Dust: A Torre (New York: Whitney Library of print found in the New York Public Li- Book by Alison Knowles,” 11. Chronicle,” New Wilderness Newsletter, Design, 1977), 187. brary. Knowles sent copies of the print 22 Helen Molesworth, “Work Avoidance: 17–24. Knowles is careful to note that 46 Ibid., 188. to a dozen artist friends, who then The Everyday Life of Marcel Duch- the “champion” of the project, direc- 47 See Miriam Schapiro, “The Education “collaged it, cut it up, bottled it, etc., amp’s Readymades,” Art Journal 57.4 tor Henry Marguiles, had died a week of Women as Artists: Project and sent it back to make up the goat (Winter 1998), 50–61. after its arrival, thereby setting off a Womanhouse,” Art Journal 31.3 gallery.” This detail was recorded by 23 Harold Rosenberg, Artworks and chain of destructive actions. (Spring 1972), 270. Alison Knowles in conversation with Packages (New York: Horizon Press, Charlie Morrow in “A Dialogue: 1969), 150. His review of The Big Book

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