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# The Book of Alison Knowles
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/the-book-of-alison-knowles/
- Published: 2026-09-21T18:56:18.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-21T18:56:18.000Z
- Description: A retrospective traces the language of bookmaking in her expansive work and its radical influence on American art.
- Author: Leah Triplett Harrington
- Tags: Art Review, Review, Alison Knowles, Grey Art Museum, New York

A retrospective of the late Fluxus artist [Alison Knowles](https://hyperallergic.com/alison-knowles-the-first-woman-of-fluxus-dies-at-92/) — known for performances, prints, sculptures, scores, and more — positions her as, of all things, an author. Curated by Karen Moss and traveling from the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), the exhibition traces Knowles’s lifetime of output through the language of bookmaking — binding, paper, sequencing, narrative — and its radical influence on American art from the 1960s to today. 

Knowles's capacity to absorb, translate, and communicate her surroundings proved pivotal in introducing the interdisciplinary, avant-garde, and performance-based tenets of Fluxus (meaning “to flow”) to American art in the early 1960s. Indeed, the exhibition’s first section introduces Knowles not only as a distinct artist, but also as an influential part of the larger movement invested in collaboration and ephemerality. [New materialism](https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/new-materialisms-reconfiguring-object?ref=hyperallergic.com), the [relational aesthetics](https://hyperallergic.com/wtf-is-relational-aesthetics/) of the 1990s, and today's [dialogic practices](https://hammer.ucla.edu/public-engagement/resources/glossary?ref=hyperallergic.com) owe much to Fluxus, and the exhibition makes clear Knowles’s formative role in shaping contemporary artistic collaboration through iterative performances and works that use wide-ranging materials such as beans, shoes, and books. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/2026/09/Installation-of-Live-Computer-Print-out-and-Computer-Poem-Drop.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/2026/09/Installation-of-documentation-from-Making-a-Salad-first-performed-at-the-ICA-London--1963.jpg)

Left: Installation view of **by Alison Knowles: A Retrospective (1960–2022)*; right: Bruce Fleming, Knowles and others performing "Proposition #2: Make a Salad" at Festival of Misfits, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in 1962, photoreproduction on panel

At the entrance of this retrospective is a cluster of Knowles’s early works, including a reproduction of the newsprint-hued screenprint “Room”(1960), created with artist and composer George Brecht. The workis displayed above a vitrine with announcements from Knowles’s first shows, including her 1962 exhibition at Judson Gallery, the epicenter of the New York performance scene at the time. That year proved momentous for Knowles. She toured Europe with Fluxus founder George Maciunas, her collaborator (and on-again, off-again husband) Dick Higgins, and others. Footage from the collective’s time at Fluxus Festival in Wiesbaden, West Germany, is featured on a monitor nearby, as is a photograph from Knowles’s first performance of perhaps her best-known work, “Proposition #2: Make a Salad” (1962), at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art. 

"Make a Salad" is the first of several works dealing with food represented here — including 1964’s “Variation #1: Make a Soup,” 1963–64’s scroll book “Bean Rolls,” and the recurring work “Identical Lunch,” first begun in the late 1960s — and encapsulates how banality was elevated to the extraordinary in Knowles’s hands. For the work, she gathers and then prepares a medley of greens, vegetables, and dressing for a group; as in her other collaborative, culinary-driven pieces, the point is as much how her audience and partners consume the work as it is her individual making of it. 

Fluxus's use of cooperation, banality, and repeated gestures demonstrates the group’s abiding interest in shifting the avant-garde’s focus from solitary artistic genius to the aesthetics of group action. If Knowles’s preferred material seemed to be fiber (beans, greens, and paper), her interest was certainly in participation, as seen in the multi-media, jungle-gym-like sculptures “The Big Book” (1966) and “The Boat Book”(2014–15), or architecture, as in “The House of Dust” (1971). The latter, first presented at a New York housing development in 1969, is represented through photoreproductions of community activations in and out of the mound-like structure. On a more grandiose level, Knowles also created an infinite, computer-generated poem of randomized language to print on tractor-feed paper, as in “Live computer printout of the House of Dust(1971/2022), or to be disseminated from a helicopter, as with “Computer Poem Drop Event” (1971). 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/2026/09/Installation-of-The-Boat-Book.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/2026/09/Installation-of-Being-with-Paper-.jpg)

Left: Installation view of Alison Knowles, "The Boat Book" (2014–15), mixed-media installation; right: Alison Knowles, "Being with Paper" (2022), archival Ultra Chrome XD2 ink printed on Arches paper

These computer-based works, however, feel more divorced from the sociopolitical conditions of the everyday. While making a salad, sharing a lunch, or preparing beans might be a universally accessible reference, using computers, building an uninhabited shelter, or helicopter transport seem decidedly privileged in 1970s terms. Looking at documentation of “Computer Poem Drop Event,” it’s hard not to recall public television broadcasts of United States soldiers deploying to Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Knowles seems too perceptive an artist not to have considered this reading, but viewers of the retrospective are ultimately left wondering if and how she did. Similarly, art historical context is lacking for the sound sculpture “Paper Gongs” (1998–99) or the artist book and performance piece “Loose Pages”(1983). These works, with undulating forms and rich textures, seem related to that of contemporaries [Lynda Benglis](https://hyperallergic.com/tag/lynda-benglis/) or [Michelle Stuart](https://hyperallergic.com/michelle-stuart-flight-of-time-galerie-lelong/), for instance, but any connection to minimalism or earthworks goes unacknowledged. 

Knowles feels most evocative when she is most humble and open. Books and the kitchen are, for her, resources and means for mark-making, as seen in the trio of vellum scrolls from the *Three Songs* series, which she began in 1971\. Each is a sepia blueprint of onion skins Knowles took from her own kitchen, wrapped in plastic, and ran through a blueprint machine, resulting in a patterned vertical cascade. These are installed alongside the screenprint “A Change in Seasons” (2000) and the assemblage “Broken Line with Slippers” (1983), which likewise use the modest, homemade, or domestic to imprint her individual, if ordinary, story. 

Correspondingly, Knowles’s most resonant work might be “Proposition #6: Shoes of Your Choice” (1963), in which the audience is invited to describe a pair of their shoes — each performer creating an individual narrative as part of a collection of stories. As she does with most of her scores, Knowles performed “Proposition #6” throughout her life, as if in turn assembling each iteration into a larger collection. This inclination to archive feels inspired by texts and books and underpinned by a deep sense of empathy, as if by authoring and performing, she could walk in another’s shoes. Knowles’s last work on view in this exhibition is “Being with Paper”(2022), a grayscale close-up of a footprint in dust. She leaves us with an indelible mark of her presence that we can weave into the stories of our individual lives, just as she did throughout her six-decade career. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/2026/09/Installation-of-Lentils-Over-Cotton-Slippers-Loose-Pages-.jpg)

Alison Knowles, "Lentils Over Cotton Slippers" (1986–88), lentils poured onto cotton paper pulp molded to slippers 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/2026/09/Installation-of-Paper-Gongs.jpg)

[by Alison Knowles: A Retrospective (1960–2022)](https://greyartmuseum.nyu.edu/exhibitions/by-alison-knowles-a-retrospective-1960-2022?ref=hyperallergic.com) *continues at the Grey Art Museum (18 Cooper Square, East Village, Manhattan) through January 30, 2027\. The exhibition was organized by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) and curated by Karen Moss.*