Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: while you marvel at monumental canvases and flashy installations, Alison Knowles has spent six decades composing a body of work with such discreet radicalism that it becomes almost invisible. This American artist, founding figure of Fluxus who passed away last month, elevated the everyday into score, the bean into a musical instrument, and the salad into a poetic event. Her artistic legacy is not measured in spectacular blows but in repeated gestures, in attentions given, in shared presences.
Born in New York in 1933, Alison Knowles initially followed the well-trodden paths of Abstract Expressionist painting at the Pratt Institute, under the tutelage of Adolph Gottlieb and Josef Albers. But very quickly, the young artist understood what she later formulated with disarming clarity: “What I learned there is that I am an artist. What I should have learned is that I am not a painter” [1]. This awareness led her to destroy all her canvases in a bonfire behind her brother’s house, an inaugural gesture that foreshadowed her entry into the avant-garde Fluxus movement. The year 1962 marked her European debut at the first Fluxus festival in Wiesbaden, Germany, alongside George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, and Dick Higgins, who would become her husband.
The score as poetry of gesture
Alison Knowles’ contribution to the history of 20th-century poetry remains widely underestimated, probably because her practice refuses the ornamentation of traditional verse to embrace the form that Fluxus calls “event scores”. These texts, strikingly brief, constitute action protocols rather than closed works. Knowles herself defines them as “a one or two line recipe for an action” [2]. This definition, of apparent simplicity, hides considerable conceptual sophistication.
Take Make a Salad, created in 1962 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. The score is summed up in three words: “Make a salad.” Yet this laconic directive generates performances of inexhaustible sensory and social richness. The artist chops vegetables to the rhythm of live music, amplifies the chopping sounds with microphones, mixes the ingredients by tossing them in the air, then serves the salad to the audience. Over the decades, this piece has metamorphosed: at the Tate Modern in 2008, Knowles prepared a salad for 1,900 people, using rakes to mix and shovels to serve. The work grows, transforms, but retains its essence: that of a domestic act elevated to the status of a collective ritual.
Knowles’ poetics is part of a distinct lineage from European concrete poetry, while standing apart through her attention to the body and the tactile. Where concrete poetry works the materiality of language on the page, Knowles inscribes it in the space and time of performance. Her scores are not works to be contemplated but invitations to lived experience. The Identical Lunch, begun in 1969, exemplifies this approach: the artist eats the same meal every day, “a tuna sandwich on toasted wheat bread with lettuce and butter, no mayonnaise, and a glass of buttermilk or a cup of soup,” and invites others to share this ritual. The repetitive gesture becomes meditation, the banal becomes remarkable.
This approach finds an unexpected extension in The House of Dust, a computer-generated poem from 1967 created in collaboration with composer James Tenney. Knowles establishes four lists of words describing the materials, places, light sources, and inhabitants of a house. Tenney translates these lists into FORTRAN, and an IBM computer produces thousands of quatrains by random combinations. This pioneering work of digital poetry reveals Knowles’ ambition: to explore new media while maintaining a deeply collaborative and human dimension.
Knowles’ scores function according to an economy of means that recalls the haiku tradition, without reducing to it. They share with the Japanese form an extreme attention to the present moment, a capacity to extract the singular from the everyday. Shoes of Your Choice, created in 1963, simply asks participants to describe the shoes they are wearing. This minimalist directive opens a narrative space where personal stories, memories, and affects unfold. The shoe becomes a metonymy of existence, a support for speech that reveals itself. In 2011, Knowles performed this piece at the White House before President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama, proving that formal simplicity does not exclude institutional recognition.
Sound occupies a central place in Knowles’ poetic work. Beans, a recurring motif she favors for their “affordable and everywhere available” character, become musical instruments. Bean Garden, presented in 1971, consists of a large amplified platform covered with dried beans that visitors tread on, thus producing random music through their movements. This attention to sound as poetic material distances her from her contemporaries in the Fluxus movement, for whom music was often the preferred target of their iconoclastic interventions. Knowles does not seek to destroy music but to expand its boundaries, to make heard the latent musicality of ordinary objects.
Architecture as a livable book
If poetry structures Knowles’ approach to language and gesture, architecture provides the conceptual framework for her reflection on space and the body. Her “book-objects” overturn the traditional hierarchy between container and content, between support and text. The Big Book, made in 1967, measures 2.4 meters high and consists of eight movable pages fixed to a metal spine. Each page, equipped with wheels, can be physically turned, creating different spaces and routes for the reader. The work contains a gallery, a library, a grass tunnel, a window, as well as salvaged domestic objects: toilet, stove, telephone. The book becomes architecture, architecture becomes narration.
This monumental piece travels through Europe, progressively deteriorating before completely disintegrating in San Diego. The material fragility of the work contributes to its meaning: The Big Book is not designed to last forever but to be experienced, handled, worn by the bodies that pass through it. This anti-monumental conception of artistic architecture directly opposes the modernist sculptural tradition and its quest for permanence. Knowles prefers the ephemeral to the permanent, the process to the result.
The House of Dust extends this reflection by giving architectural form to the eponymous computer poem. In 1970, Knowles built a fiberglass structure on the California Institute of the Arts campus, based on the quatrain “a house of dust / outdoors / lit by natural light / inhabited by friends and enemies.” This house-sculpture hosts classes, film screenings, picnics, gift exchanges. It functions as an active social space rather than a contemplative artwork. An initial version, installed near a housing project building in Chelsea, had been destroyed by arson in 1968, recalling the vulnerability of artistic proposals that venture outside the protected spaces of cultural institutions.
Knowles’s architectural approach is rooted in an implicit critique of the modern separation between art and life. Her inhabitable books offer an alternative to functionalist architecture: they do not respond to any specific program, nor aim for measurable efficiency. They create situations rather than solutions. The Boat Book, a recent variation of The Big Book dedicated to her fisherman brother, incorporates nets, shells, a fishing rod, a kettle, personal objects laden with memory. Architecture thus becomes keeper of individual stories, a vehicle for affective transmissions.
The “Loose Pages” series, begun in 1983 in collaboration with papermaker Coco Gordon, radicalizes this exploration. Knowles creates pages for each part of the body: the human spine replaces the traditional bookbinding. In other page sculptures, the visitor literally enters the page with a part of their body. Mahogany Arm Rest (1989) and We Have no Bread (No Hai Pan) (1992) invite spectators to physically engage with formats four to five meters in size. The body becomes a reading tool, architecture becomes somatic text.
This tactile conception of architectural space distinguishes Knowles from her contemporaries. Whereas conceptual architecture of the 1960s-1970s often favors visual and theoretical dimensions, Knowles emphasizes haptic experience. She states: “I don’t want people to passively look at my work, but to actively participate by touching it, eating it, following listening instructions, making or physically taking something” [3]. This insistence on active participation anticipates what theorists would later call relational aesthetics, without ever falling into the trap of the spectacular or didactic.
Knowles’s book-architectures also question our relationship to knowledge and its transmission. By making the book inhabitable, she suggests that reading is not a passive activity of reception but an active exploration, a physical and mental journey. This spatial metaphor of reading dialogues with contemporary reception theories while embodying them literally. The reader is no longer facing the text but inside it, surrounded by it, traversed by it.
An ethic of sharing
Alison Knowles’ work outlines the contours of an artistic practice based on generosity and attention. Contrary to the romantic myth of the solitary artist, she has constantly favored collaboration: with John Cage for the book Notations in 1969, with Marcel Duchamp for the screenprint Flying Hearts in 1967, with countless performers throughout the decades. Her twin daughters, Jessica and Hannah Higgins, participated in her performances from their childhood. This collaborative dimension does not dilute the work but strengthens it, creating a network of relationships and exchanges that constitute its very substance.
The recurrent use of the bean in her work illustrates this ethic. Knowles chooses this food not for its abstract symbolic value but for its concrete qualities: available everywhere, affordable, a source of universal sustenance. Bean Rolls (1963), one of her first book-objects, consists of a tin can filled with dry beans and tiny rolls of found texts. Shaking the can produces a rattle sound from the beans. The object functions simultaneously as a book, a musical instrument, and a sculpture. This convergence of media illustrates the concept of “intermedia” theorized by Dick Higgins, her husband, but Knowles embodies it with a particular grace.
The apparent modesty of her means, salads, sandwiches, beans, or handmade paper, must not mask the radical nature of her statement. By choosing ordinary materials and gestures, Knowles does not seek an aesthetics of poverty but asserts a political stance: art does not belong to the elites, does not require precious materials, must not intimidate. Her scores can be performed by anyone, anywhere. This democratization of artistic practice opposes the commodification systems that dominate the contemporary art world.
Knowles has lived and worked in her SoHo loft since 1972, transforming this space into a permanent laboratory where life and art mingle. Her gallerist James Fuentes notes that “her most powerful works were her most ephemeral works” [4], thus highlighting the paradox of a practice that resists archiving and conservation. How to exhibit an eaten salad, a consumed sandwich, disappeared sounds? This question haunts institutions attempting to patrimonialize the Fluxus movement. The retrospective presented in 2022 at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, the first major exhibition dedicated to the artist, bears witness to this difficulty: how to show a work whose essence lies in the very act of its performance?
Alison Knowles passed away on October 29, 2025 in her New York apartment, leaving behind a body of work that continues to raise essential questions about the nature of art, its functions, its audiences. Her practice, remarkably coherent over six decades, offers an alternative to the logics of spectacularization and commodification. She reminds us that art can arise from the simplest gestures, that a shared salad or a shaken bean can open spaces of contemplation and communion. In an era saturated with images and information, her invitation to slow down, to touch, to listen, to participate, resonates with particular acuity. Knowles’s legacy is not measured in sold works or prestigious exhibitions, but in the countless artists she inspired to seek poetry in the ordinary, to compose with everyday life, to make every gesture a possible score. Her very discretion constitutes her supreme elegance, her refusal of spectacle her greatest audacity. Listen carefully to the rustling of the beans: it is the music of a world where art and life are one, where sharing takes precedence over possession, where presence matters more than permanence.
- Ruud Janssen, “Interview with Alison Knowles”, Fluxus Heidelberg Center, 2006
- Ellen Pearlman, “Interviews With Alison Knowles, July, October 2001, New York City”, Brooklyn Rail, January, February 2002
- Jori Finkel, “When Making a Salad Felt Radical”, The New York Times, July 18, 2022
- Alex Greenberger, “Her Ordinary Materials: Fluxus Artist Alison Knowles on Her Carnegie Museum Show”, ARTnews, June 30, 2016
