Object/Poems: Alison Knowles's Feminist Archite(X)
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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- Alison Knowles’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 performances 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 Marcel Duchamp’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 Emmett Williams. 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 John Cage 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 Fluxus, 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 performance, 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 modernism: “[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 music 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, Philip Corner, 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 Something Else Press, 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.