Bella Butler visited the Alison Knowles retrospective at Grey Art Museum in New York. Here, she thinks through why the exhibit had such a profound, personal effect on her, and argues for its significance within the context of the art (and the wider) world today.
By the time I arrive at the exhibition by Alison Knowles: A Retrospective (1960–2022), a retrospective of American artist Alison Knowles at New York University’s Grey Art Museum, I am hot, thirsty and ready for lunch. It’s August in the city. The first works I see, installed on the wall opposite the entrance, are a series of yellow-tinted screen prints on roughly 12-inch-square canvases. And depicted on the canvases are uncomfortable close-ups of people’s mouths caught in the act of eating. Fitting, I think.
I look down at the title of the series, printed at the bottom of each canvas: The Identical Lunch. Also detailed on the canvases are the subjects, who include Fluxus founder George Maciunas, along with artists such as Ay-O and Shigeko Kubota, and endearingly, Knowles’s daughters Hannah B and Jessica Higgins.
Everyone in the series is eating the same food. In 1967, Knowles wrote the event-score titled The Identical Lunch as a result of the lunch she ate frequently with the composer Philip Corner at the Riss Restaurant in Chelsea. After he noticed she ordered the same thing every time, he suggested she turn the ritual into a performance. The score simply states the meal: “A tuna fish sandwich on wheat toast with lettuce and butter, no mayo and a large glass of buttermilk or a cup of soup.” As exemplified by the screen prints – which used Polaroids as their starting point – she invited her friends to join her, turning it into a durational performance lasting two years.
Knowles was one of the first artists to utilize food as a medium (think Gordon Matta-Clark’s FOOD, or more recently, artist Lucien Smith’s re-imagining of it as the restaurant Food, which opened downtown on Canal Street in 2025). As the curator of the retrospective Karen Moss notes, “As the sole female co-founder of Fluxus, Knowles’s work is distinct from that of her male counterparts, particularly in her interest in food, domestic materials, and quotidian activities, and in observing ‘the secrets of ordinary things’.”
So I eat up the yellow canvases with my eyes and begin to awaken the slow digestive processes needed for a retrospective. The exhibition immediately enters me into a relationship with time, with regard to myself as well as the artist and her practice.
While my eye is initially caught by the yellow-tinted mouths of The Identical Lunch series, I am a frustratingly obedient person and stubbornly insist on starting at “the beginning” with the “first” thing in the room: the timeline of Knowles’s life. There is something frantic and paradoxical about it. It’s large, spanning length-wise across an entire twenty-foot or so wall. It begins in 1933, with Knowles’s birth in Scarsdale, New York and ends with her death in October of 2025 “at the age of exactly 92 ½.” And what’s in between? Education, marriage, divorce, friendships, collaborations, scores, performances, publications – not necessarily in that order. I found humor in it because to put her life on a line exposes the impossibility of doing so. If I were given a pen and pad after my walk-through and asked to create a timeline of her life and practice, it would be a ball of unraveled yarn.
This is because her practice was often one of returns, recursivity, retracing or simply waiting, starting a project one year and finishing it years later. Nothing is rushed and no door is closed. The scores that Knowles wrote were rarely enacted only a single time. In fact, she performed most of her scores continually, in public, in private and within institutional walls. Her most famous event-score was titled Make a Salad and was developed and premiered in October 1962 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and was performed over a dozen times throughout her life in various locations such as the High Line, the Tate Modern and Art Basel. Notably, her last performance in 2025 before her passing, Nivea Cream Piece, was initially conceived of and performed way back in 1962. Photos of both performances are pasted on the walls of the exhibit.
But the frantic timeline makes you question the shape of time itself, of life itself – and I appreciate that.
Knowles’s enactments of her scores – an event-based approach to art – epitomize her relationship to time with regard to her practice and attitude towards art as whole. To turn away from the previously existing, the there-ness of the phenomenological world, is a mistake, yet all too easy to do. But this is where scores can aid the world, where Knowles’s practice shows itself to be inescapably one of presentness, albeit a presentness grounded in reverence for the passage of time, for the iteration before it. As I walk through the retrospective, I begin to see the artist’s scores as connective tissue (an aid), both for the larger exhibition and more generally in the world. They connect the artist to the world, the viewer to the event of the art.
A score keeps time, induces it, and also creates it, both sonically and visually. It is scores that so simply lay out one of the central tenets of Fluxus: everyday life is art. You just have to pay attention.
Scores can be thought of as invitations – or sometimes “proposals” in the case of Knowles’s – that offer a script or simple instruction to enact an activity. Some of the scores included in the retrospective read as conceptually tangible, such as “A member of the audience is invited to come forward to a microphone if one is available and describe a pair of shoes, the ones he is wearing or another pair. He is encouraged to tell where he got them, the size, the color, why he likes them, etc.” (a score of the artist’s from 1963 titled Shoes of Your Choice) and some more abstract, such as “Celebrate each red thing” (a score titled Celebration Red also from 1962).
The second room contains a multitude of works, including an eight-foot-tall sculptural “book” titled The Boat Book (2014) filled with large-scale pages featuring nautical references, personal ephemera and prints, and Three Songs (1971), sepia ink prints on vellum scrolls, which, when turned horizontally, can be used as visual scores for performance.
But Knowles didn’t only engage with bodies or forms of the natural world. I am now met with a machine. The machine has something of a mouth and every minute, feeds out a few inches of paper from a long scroll that slowly collects in an accordioned pile on the ground. This machine is “writing” a poem, a project titled House of Dust (1967), which Knowles created in collaboration with composer James Tenney. It works by generating permutations of quatrains randomly drawn from a set of four lists consisting of a material, a location, a light source, and a category of human inhabitants. Leaning dangerously close to the object, I can read one of the quatrains: “A house of string / in a deserted church / using electricity / inhabited by little boys.”
The fact that the machine sits on a short pedestal in the gallery – a small stage, if you will – anthropomorphizes it for me, changing it from a simple machine into a performer. The poems are not merely about the words themselves (if they were, you’d be able to read them more easily instead of their obscured state) but rather about the process of their emergence. Put another way, the computer-generated poem is less about the poetry than it is about the mode of its generation, the mode of meaning-making that is happening in real time before our eyes; it moves away from language as pure semiotics towards language as malleable, playful, and having other sensorial properties, like sound and perhaps even a hapticity. I want to touch all of it, roll out the scroll and spread it across the length of the room.
But crucially, I can’t touch it. Neither I nor the absent artist has control.
Control is a nuanced concept insofar as art is concerned. Having “control” over one’s art can often mean having some “say” over the viewer’s interpretation or level of involvement with the work. But Knowles’s practice – as well as the philosophies of the 1960s avant-garde movement Fluxus – foregoes notions of control in favor of chance. This is not to say she was without intention or vision, but rather to say that she was evidently more interested in connectivity and possibility than dynamics that create distance.
Lucia Fabio quotes Knowles at the beginning of her essay in the show’s catalog: “The events I perform, the prints I have made and the environments I build are designed to put the spectator/performer in touch with him/herself and the real world.” Connectivity, and not only in the abstract sense, but through all the senses. I decide it is no mistake that she uses the phrase “in touch” to describe the modality of connection, evoking in us the image of skin-contact between human bodies and the elements of the environment around them.
As I near the end of the show, the concept of touch and the surfaces of subjects, display themselves within Knowles’s practice in the most legible of ways. In the second to last room I am confronted with a series of organic appearing objects, highly textured with a range of neutral colors. As I soon learn, the objects are wearable and functional. They double as items of clothing and musical instruments.
The items are made out of flax-pulp and filled with legumes, so they can produce sound when used for performances. For example, two works titled Paper Gong (1988–99) and Bean Turners (started in 2000) rattle with a range of surprising sounds when interacted with. Additionally, placed in the vitrine are a pair of wearable flax sculptures titled Lentils over Cotton Slippers (1986–88), which provide a clear shoe-like space for feet to be inserted, but which rise from a rectangular base, almost as if they are growing out of a small patch of ground. In the bottom right corner of the left shoe, there is an almost illegible label pasted on it which cleverly reads “Footnotes.”
Before leaving the same room, there is a video that shows Knowles adorning another body (most likely her daughter) with flax and cotton garments, or “pages” as they are called. They are products of Loose Pages (1983), a collaborative project with papermaker Coco Gordon. When fully dressed, the performer’s body is visually transformed into the spine of the book. In addition to the relationship between material and body, sculpture and skin, touch and sound, this project returns us to the artist’s relationship to time. Wearable garments, wearable sculptures, are related to time in that they inherently are objects subject to change. With every body they adorn, they are transformed, and with every minute that passes, the organic materials are affected by the natural elements. As the tombstone notes, “as the piece is performed over time, the sonic qualities of the paper change.” Again, no door is closed.
To describe Knowles’s practice, her lifelong partner, Dick Higgins, coined the radical term “intermedia.” It points to the fact that her practice and relationship to media is not just “multi” but exists in all the spaces in between. Scores, performance, sculpture, prints, writing, food, plants, technological programming. It’s not about accumulation of mediums, but rather an activation of spaces, of approaches, that might get lost in the cracks of strictly designated genres of making. As Moss notes in the catalogue, the intermedial approach emphasizes “the dialectic between the media.”
The last room displays her long commitment to publications and artists’ books. It is an apt way to close: books, objects full of hope, endurance and the embodiment of the prefix “re.” They are aged and yellowed, obviously objects that have been fruitfully engaged with. When I reach the books, I realize how many times I’d have to walk through the space to fully grasp it, how I can only touch on a fraction of the works present in this show.
I am never well equipped for a retrospective. How can one be? A retrospective catches me off guard as much as it entices me. I’m addicted to retrospectives, not only for what you get, but for what you don’t get. I’m addicted to their fervent energy that enters me from all sides as well as the big gaping holes I’m left with. Because to reconcile an artist with their art, the art with the artist, you’ve got to love inconsistencies and contradictions. You’ve got to come to terms with their frightening humanness and the fact that they, too, are affected by time. Knowles’s art shows she knows this too. It is her philosophy, the return, to both ourselves and what we produce.
I felt a tremendous amount of relief walking through the space.
This exhibit didn’t feel like a show where I was supposed to understand everything, where I was expected to walk out knowing how exactly I got from A to B, from this score to that print, from this print to that poem. Instead, it was a show that left me reassessing my values – as both artist and human – as well as my ability to reassess, to revisit, to be progressively non-linear in my practice and therefore more open in my engagement with the larger world. A retrospective is a show about time, a way of performing the act of letting go, letting incongruity exist in the space between the artist and their art.
“Listen as if you had never heard it; look at it as if you had never seen it before. Investigate what you already know,” Knowles is quoted as saying in the catalogue. I think back to the series of mouths eating lunch, the images that welcomed me. What I already know is: hunger and my desire to partake in my daily act of cooking and eating. Metabolic processes are on my mind, Knowles’s works sloshing around inside of me. My nerves are activated.
I exit the building, reluctantly myself across the hot city sidewalks, and stare at the shoes on the subway, like I’ve never seen a shoe before. And go find lunch. Maybe I should take a picture.
