Visitors to the Berkeley Art Museum and the Pacific Film Archive will soon turn red. “To mark the opening ofBy Allison Knowles: Retrospective (1960–2022),“ The artist will paste a large grid on the floor of the museum and invite visitors on July 23 to place one red object on each square. This is a retaliation for her “Celebration Red” (later titled “Homage to EachRed Thing” by Hans Ulrich Obrist) in 1962. An influential show of the artist’s instructions “Do It”. ) It is also one of the most famous and vibrant participatory artwork in Knowles’ long history.
A loose group of avant-garde artists, best known as members of Fluxus, who accidentally accepted the use of “intermediate” or interdisciplinary forms. In the 1960s, Knowles, 89, has been creating interactive, engaging and uncategorical artwork for the past 50 years. They range in size from small hand-held sculptures to 8-foot-high walk installations that look like giant books. Speaking recently from her longtime SoHo studio in Manhattan, where she lives, the artist talked about some of her signature themes and materials. Here is the edited excerpt.
Many of your works are participatory in that they are generous. Art is what you give to people.
I like it very much. I want you to expand the conditions of engagement with your own work. Instead of looking at my work passively, I want them to actively participate by touching, eating, listening, physically making and taking, and participating in activities.
Beans have been a favorite material in your work for years. I’ve used it in a variety of ways, including embedding it in handmade paper or putting it in a paper sleeve to create a sound maker called Bean Turner. What makes beans so attractive?
Well, they are affordable and available everywhere, and there are many different types that you can cook and work with. Everyone knows different names for beans in their culture. And when the beans dry, they make a great sound. My study of music was minimal. I did a little piano work and liked to sing, but I didn’t have much formal study. Beans have become an instrument for me to make sounds in my performances. They gave me the action of puncturing the text. Beans are acoustic and can make sounds. This is important.
Other women like Charlotte Moorman and Yoko Ono were later associated with Fluxus, but do you think you were the first woman to perform Fluxus in the 1960s?
I was the only woman in the 1962 Fluxus Performance Group. It was a stage set for performances in Europe as Fluxus changed from an idea, a project, or a name to a group of performers taking on new music and intermedia. I was very happy to work on the tour.I was honored [to be the only woman] I tried to take advantage of the opportunity.
At a concert, he was hit by a rotten tomato in Wiesbaden.
There have been many attacks on what we did on stage, but frankly, I don’t remember the rotten tomatoes. I remember people getting up and leaving — and often. But there was something I had to do, so I did it.
Some of the early works, such as “Proposal # 2: Making Salads” (1962), consisted of preparing salads on stage and serving them to museum audiences, but at the time It must have looked radical.Later you will be Tate High line.. Do you think your audience or their sense of anger has changed over time?
Performance art enables many human activities that were never available when they started on the stage of a concert. Performance concepts include food, kids, weather, names and more. I like that.
What was the material for the original “Make a Salad”?
The salad had to be made with the ingredients selected during the trip to the local market. Salads have recently become available, at least in this country, but the idea of making green food available for performances in 1962 was very strange. It was also difficult for those who host concerts, who are usually concerned about sound, to worry that they might suddenly eat green food.
How would you describe the idea of Fluxus’s “event score”?
George brechtFluxus artist and founding member, devised an “event score” format and used it for proposed actions performed like music in a concert program. It was our own way of scoring our actions and performance in a way as serious as Sati’s score. A sentence like “make a salad” is the score of the event.
You collaborated with John Cage on books and performances. What kind of work did he do?
It was a wonderful friendship. We enjoyed working together, cooking together, eating together, and picking mushrooms together. Find the mushroom, otherwise find the green. The important thing was to work together outdoors on the trail.
He was a little noisy and didn’t get along with everyone. He paid homage to my work, which made a lot of sense to me. His work was very basic of what I was trying to do.
I heard you inadvertently gave the name of your husband, writer Dick Higgins, his publisher, Something else press??
Yes, Dick told me I wanted to call it a shirt sleeve press. I didn’t like the idea, so I said, “Call it something else.”
In addition to the book design, I created a book-inspired sculpture. A walk installation or performance prop that makes the wall look like a book page. The spine of the performer’s body is reminiscent of the spine of a book.. Does the shape of the book resonate with you?
Interested in transforming handheld objects into a full-fledged architecture, this book has become an accessible tool for exploring it. The person or performer at work can step into and activate the object. Handheld objects can be models. At Something Else Press, I edited and graphic designed some of Dick’s books.I finally designed and called for a walk-through live-in book published as a single copy by the press. Big book.. I continued to design books as an environment.
The Berkeley Show is creating a new version of “Celebration Red” (1962). Can you imagine celebrating another color, such as blue or green?
I am very attracted to the red color and connect it with courage. But it’s not really about color — it’s an opportunity to access the relationships that color provides. Shirts, hats and beans can all be red. This is a very common color in food and clothing, so it gives us the opportunity to rejuvenate our network of people, things and behaviors.
The museum said you want to fly to Berkeley on the first weekend. Would you like to add your own red object to the grid?
I definitely want to be there, so I would like to add something. May add tomatoes.
