Artist Presentations:
Alison Knowles
“Alison Knowles was born in New York City in 1933. She is a visual artist known for her soundworks, installations, performances, publications and association with Fluxus, the experimental avant-garde group formally founded in 1962.” This is ‘Alison Knowles General Bio’ from her website online. http://www.aknowles.com/.
One piece she does is called ‘Make A Salad.’ i watched a video on youtube about the performance of ‘Make A Salad’ that she did at the Tate Modern in 2008. She originally preformed this event score in London at the ICA Gallery in 1962. She chops up salad elements (lettuces, cucumber, radish), then tosses them off an indoor bridge onto a tarp where she can mix and serve the salad. Then 1900 people ate the salad.
Event scores began in the early 60s, 'Make A Salad' was one of her first. These were to challenge legitimate theater. To Alison, this changed theater where day to day people could now take part on stage. The idea behind the piece was to put ordinary things onto the stage, like making a salad.
She doesn’t like people to interject with their own works while her works are going on. She wants you to observe the simplicity of doing one singular small task.
‘The Identical Lunch’ was more of happenstance where her friend Philip Corner mentioned that she would have the same lunch at this restaurant they would go to called Riss. Then they came up with that she was preforming a piece by getting the same lunch each day. She brought it to news levels of going to other places to get the same lunch. She mentioned it was hard to get wheat bread in Germany, then when traveling through Asia she brought pictures of her lunch, she would have them bring out what ever was closes and regional identical to their countries.
I do this at many restaurants where I will get the same thing or same two things to trade off. It was funny because she had mentioned in one of her videos about this how the Riss was not a very good restaurant, so the lunch she choose of a tunafish sandwich with lettuces and butter, no mayo, and a cup of soup or glass of buttermilk, was the best thing they had on the menu. This also reminded me of my dad. He has traveled a bunch and is a bit of a picky eater. He mentioned to me one time that he gets spaghetti almost everywhere because its not hard to mess up or would be completely strange and most everywhere has it. An identical lunch while you travel.
Alison likes to bring froward simple and even mundane things we do to light. She wants you to focus on the task at hand and keep you engaged. I picked ‘The Identical Lunch’ and ‘Make A Salad’ to talked about because they a both so ordinary things. ‘Make A Salad’ however shows this to the public whereas ‘The Identical Lunch’ reflects upon the public through s realization of something she personally does. These two tasks of getting the same food or preparing your food as very typical, but makes me think about sharing more on myself when the first week of term comes around. Teachers and students want to know more about each individual and sometimes I feel like I am very boring like these tasks. I am not like everyone else and am unique, yet there are these small things that all relate us together.
-Hannah Welter
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