At MAMC+, a successful tribute to Alison Knowles

Saint-Priest-en-Jarez (The Loire). Alison Knowles died on October 29 at the age of 92, “at home, surrounded by her family”specifies Alexandre Quelle, head of the scientific department at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Saint-Étienne, co-curator of the exhibition which is currently paying tribute to the American artist. The recent disappearance of this gives a tone“bittersweet” to this panorama retracing sixty years of creation, underlines art historian Karen Moss, who provided significant documentation work upstream. The calendar indeed gives a particular resonance to this traveling retrospective hosted by the MAMC+ before its final stop planned in New York.

Alison Knowles is known for her association with Fluxus, an avant-garde movement founded in 1962 by George Maciunas, within which she imagined event scoresfrom banal situations, such as massaging your hands with cream in front of a microphone (Nivea Cream Piece1962). His practice is characterized by his commitment to a collaborative artistic approach and by his performance “scores”, particularly around food. She has also created installations, sound works, and edited numerous publications. Several awards have distinguished his work which has been shown in leading institutions (MoMA, Guggenheim, Tate) but has never benefited from a major exhibition until now. It is true that the experimental and immaterial dimension of his work constitutes a challenge for museums in terms of presentation. The Saint-Etienne stage of this retrospective turns out to be the most satisfactory so far, according to the artist’s son-in-law present at the opening. This success is due as much to the clear and lively scenography designed by Nicolas Brun, the museum’s scenographer, as to the echoes offered to this artistic journey by the Fluxus collection of the MAMC+ – also enriched, in 2019, by the acquisition of one of Alison Knowles’ milestone pieces, The House of Dust (1967-2018).

A journey through the heart of Fluxus

The tour, especially in the first part, uses the graphic enhancement of archive documents to show some of the actions performed by the artist. The Identical Lunch, restored through period photographs, shows the way in which from the very beginning, Alison Knowles worked to blur the boundaries between art and life, inviting her friends for two years in turn to share the identical menu for her lunch. The chronological progression is marked by a few key works, including The Boat Book (see ill.), variant produced by the artist from the original edition of his Big Book (1966). This installation hybridizing the book and the habitat, language and architecture, has retained its strangeness and its evocative force. We can regret, however, that The House of Dust for its part is not made very readable. In 1967, Alison Knowles composed what is one of the first computer-generated poems. Each quatrain begins with the same sequence “A house in…” followed by options for materials, sites, light sources and type of inhabitants, randomly combined by a computer program. The result is more than 80,000 quatrains, like so many habitable verbal constructions generated by technology… a creative potential that is not really captured by the simple static presentation of the device. But a little further, the large color prints of Leonore d’Oro (1978), combining letters and images of found objects, immediately captivates with its visual poetry. And we won’t resist the urge to take a few sonic steps in The Bean Garden (1975), a sort of sandbox whose grains are white beans with a rustling sound amplified by hidden microphones. After an inventory of Alison Knowles’ various experiments, particularly with paper, a focus on the Fluxus artists in the museum’s collection extends the tour by contextualizing it. The last room combines four monographic sets of works by Robert Filliou (1926-1987), Erik Dietman (1937-2002), Ben Vautier (1935-2024) and Wolf Vostell (1932-1998) while on the ground unfolds Celebration Red (Homage to Each Red Thing)consisting of a huge red grid drawn on the ground into the boxes of which opening weekend visitors were invited to place red objects. A beautiful finale.