/

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

/

Alison Knowles' Make a salad and Identical lunch: communal and sensory performance through open scores

(USC Thesis Other)

Alison Knowles' Make a salad and Identical lunch: communal and sensory performance through open scores

PDF

Transcript (if available)

Content

Alison Knowles' Make a Salad and Identical Lunch:
Communal and Sensory Performance through Open Scores

Lucia Fabio

A Thesis Presented to the
Faculty of the USC Graduate School
University of Southern California
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
(ART AND CURATORIAL PRACTICES IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE)
May 2015

ii

DEDICATION

To my mother, who would make my tuna fish sandwiches on whole wheat bread, using plain
tuna straight from the can.

And to my first memory of eating a real American tuna sandwich at the age of six in
kindergarten. I have never been able to emulate nor find those tiny, crispy, translucent morsels
embedded in a sea of creamy fish that brought my mouth and spirit so much happiness.

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I want to thank those who have been more than generous with their time, support and knowledge
in helping me realize this work. I would like to express my most sincere gratitude to Karen
Moss, whose insight and guidance on this project were critical to shaping my argument, and
whose support and encouragement were essential in lifting my spirit. Thank you to Amelia
Jones, for supporting this research and introducing me to new theorists and writers whose works
I would not have found otherwise. Thank you to John Tain, for introducing me to the wonders of
the Getty Research Institute’s Special Collections and for inspiring the initial concept of
pursuing research based around the communal act of consumption. Thank you also to Noura
Wedell for her compassion and support as a professor.

I am overwhelmingly appreciative of Alison Knowles, for graciously speaking with me about
beans, salads and tuna. And thank you to Hannah Higgins, not only for the wealth of knowledge
and insight shared about Fluxus, but also whose interest in the intersection of art and food
validated my desire to continue investigating this topic.

To the staff of The Getty Research Institute, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Joan
Flasch Artist Book Collection and Special Collections at Northwestern University. And to
Jennifer June Swan for providing much needed structure and feedback when I needed it most.

And to my partner, Robert Andrew Mueller, thank you for your unwavering optimism,
encouragement and support in this project, and in life.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS
DEDICATION
........................................................................................................................................
ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
................................................................................................................
iii

LIST OF FIGURES
................................................................................................................................
v

ABSTRACT
...........................................................................................................................................
vi

INTRODUCTION
..................................................................................................................................
1

PROPOSITION # 2, MAKE A SALAD (1962)
................................................................................
11

IDENTICAL LUNCH, (1967)
.............................................................................................................
17

RECENT ITERATIONS OF IDENTICAL LUNCH AND MAKE A SALAD
.........................
37

CONCLUSION
.....................................................................................................................................
48

BIBLIOGRAPHY
................................................................................................................................
53

v

LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1: …………………………………..…………………..Make a Salad, ICA, London, 1962
Figure 2: ………………………………...…………………………………………Identical Lunch
Figure 3: …………………………………..……………………………………Bean Rolls, (1963)
Figure 4: ……………………………….…...What did you bring? Pamphlet from performance at
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1967
Figure 5: ………………………….….…………………The Journal of the Identical Lunch, 1971
Figure 6: ……………………………………………Screen print of Identical Lunch, 1974 edition
Figure 7: ………………………………………… Screen prints of Identical Lunch, 1990 edition
Figure 8: …..………………………….…………………Bottled Identical Lunch with Eggs, 1972
Figure 9: ……………………………………………Make a Salad at Tate Modern, London, 2008
Figure 10…………………Installation shot from Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art

vi

ABSTRACT
Alison Knowles (b. 1933), an artist associated with Fluxus since its inception in the early
1960s, makes work that incorporates diurnal rhythms, performance, and bodily consumption
with a keen attention to the everyday. Using ordinary items such as sandwiches and salads,
Knowles was one of the first artists to incorporate the communal act of food consumption into
her work while embodying fundamental aspects of Fluxus practice: using open event scores to
activate objects and perform inclusive intermedia events.
This thesis traces Knowles’ practice primarily through Proposition #1, Make a Salad
(1962) and Identical Lunch (1967), scores that have been performed numerous times throughout
her career and which have served as an essential interface with the public through the medium of
the meal. Since these event scores have remained open, Knowles has been able to continuously
enact these works, although the social implications of the objects and audience reception have
shifted during the decades following primary conception. Rather than relying solely on visual
presentation, these works are consumed by the participants, thereby offering an activated
experience of all the senses, including the olfactory and gustatory systems. The thesis culminates
with recent enactments of these scores within institutional programming that insert problematic
situations when a truly multi-sensory experience is denied.

1

INTRODUCTION
Proposition #2, Make a Salad, 1962
Make a salad.
The Identical Lunch, 1967
A tuna fish sandwich on wheat toast with lettuce and butter, no mayo, and a large glass
of buttermilk or a cup of fresh soup was and is eaten many days of each week at the same
place at about the same time.

Artist Alison Knowles incorporates banal objects from her environment into her creative
practice to underscore the humble, simple nature of everyday materials. Her oeuvre ranges from
objects such as artist books, sculptures and scores to performances, interactive installations,
sound and poetry. Throughout these media she encourages quiet contemplation on the diurnal,
and her preference for everyday materials highlights her desire for the work to be inclusive and
accessible. Knowles’ work demands that the viewer take time to engage with it through active
participation rather than passive viewing. In her work that uses edible objects, the viewer is
required to ingest rather than simply view the objects, and by ingesting them, the act of
participation deviates from normative art experiences as the focus shifts to the consumption of
food and the consuming body.
This thesis is focused on Knowles’ scores and enactments of food-based events,
Proposition #2, Make a Salad (1962) (fig. #1) and Identical Lunch (1967) (fig. #2). These two
events are not primarily experienced through sight, but also through smell, taste, sound and
touch: the perfume of the object, the sounds of preparation and of mastication, the tastes that
linger in the mouth, and the feel of the food objects as the participants handles them, and as the
food travels through their bodies. Recently, these works have been presented in ways that do not
allow for the desired breadth of sensorial experience. They have been examined within a larger

2

collection of works that incorporate food and eating in art history, however, because Make a
Salad and Identical Lunch do not fit into a traditional exhibition structure, they have been
marginalized.

Figure 1: Make a Salad, ICA London, 1962

Figure 2: Identical Lunch
The multi-sensory experience is essential to most of Knowles’ work, but it is of
paramount importance when Make a Salad and Identical Lunch are performed. As art historian

3

(and Knowles’ daughter) Hannah Higgins has pointed out in The Fluxus Experience, there are
problems in analyzing food-based practices: “Few epistemologists have theorized on taste and
smell, nor have art historians considered these elements in art.”
1
More often than not, when the
four senses beyond sight are engaged, sound and touch are the most discussed, while smell and
taste tend to be left on the margins of aesthetic experience and critical thought. This occurs not
only in art, but also but in modern Western Culture in general.
2
It is important to note that the
gastronomic writings associated with restaurant reviews do not produce an overall aesthetic
critique of the experience. These reviews are propelled primarily by commodity: if the food
adheres to a certain taste and class, then it is worth its monetary value.
Walter J. Ong, has theorized that the entire body is used to communicate its relationship
to itself and to others.
3
An infant’s first words are developed under each of the senses. Though
sight is not as vital in the very beginning phase of our lives (the touch of the mother and taste of
the milk provides the most comfort), it becomes the focus of our sensorial experience of the
world throughout the majority of our lives, particularly in Western culture. Different cultures
vary drastically in their exploitation of various senses. Actual taste can differ not just between
cultures, but also within the same culture during different time periods. Taste is different, Ong
argues, “for taste concerns what we are inclined to take into ourselves by eating, what will by
intussusception either actually become ourselves or refuse to be assimilated and perhaps kill
us.”
4
Using this logic, once Identical Lunch and Make a Salad are consumed, the event scores

1
Hannah Higgins, The Fluxus Experience (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
2002), 49.
2
Jim Drobnick, “Volatile Effects,” in Empire of the Senses, ed. David Howes (New York: Berg, 2005),
271. “The distrust of the sensual has a long history in Western culture, a distrust that can be distilled into a contest
between representational and presentational modes of information.”
3
Walter J. Ong, “The Shifting Sensorium,” in The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the
Anthropology of the Senses, ed David Howes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 27. Ong was a student
of Marshall McLuhan, who was admired and read by the members of Fluxus.
4
Ibid., 28.

4

become part of the participant. The scores are contingent on how the participant experiences the
works through the taste of the salad and the tuna fish sandwich.
John Dewey’s Art and Experience is useful for describing viewer interactions with
Fluxus works, especially those that emphasize food-based practices.
5
Though Make a Salad and
Identical Lunch incorporate life into art, Knowles frames them as art-specific experiences.
Dewey explains, “A piece of work is finished in a way that is satisfactory: a problem receives its
solution; a game played through; a situation, whether that of eating a meal […] is so rounded out
that its close is a consummation and not a cessation. Such an experience is a whole and carries
with it its own individualizing quality and self-sufficiency. It is an experience.”
6
Make a Salad
and Identical Lunch are event scores that require the participant to engage all five senses,
culminating with the sense of taste through eating. The full experience of the score is denied, and
the work cannot be completed if all five senses are not activated. Since Make a Salad and
Identical Lunch are multi-sensory, they become complete experiences when the scores are
performed and eaten.
I consulted the works of several writers and thinkers to attempt to explain viewer-
participant experience during the performance of Knowles’ scores. David Howes, an
anthropologist, has edited multiple volumes of sensory theory including not only anthropological
texts, but also texts from adjacent disciplines.
7
Jim Drobnick has written extensively on the
olfactory senses, in particular on how they relates to the perception of certain environments,

5
See Hannah Higgins, The Fluxus Experience (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
2002), xiv, 21, 31, 33, 36, 104, 188, 208, 223, and Barbara Formis, “Eating as an Aesthetic Experience,” in
Practicing Pragmatist Aesthetics: Critical Perspectives on the Arts, ed. Wojciech Małecki (Rodopi:
Amsterdam/New York, 2014), 169-183.
6
John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934; repr, New York: Penguin Group, 2005), 36- 37.
7
In the introduction of The Varieties of Sensory Experience, Howes writes that the book “challenges the
conclusion of Western psychology by confronting those conclusions with the evidence of diverse ethnotheories of
perception and cognition. The anthropology of the sense also provides a platform from which to critique the visual
reductionism of Western canons of aesthetics…”

5

including that of the gallery and institution. There is little writing within art theory and criticism
addressing the gustatory as an aesthetic experience, This is because fewer artists use food as a
medium than those who make visual, audio or tactile works and also because of the difficulty of
conceptualizing a sense that is individual and based upon social constructs. I have relied on Joel
C. Kuipers’ “Matter of Taste in Weyéwa” in which he uses ritual and key social events to explain
the differences in words used to describe particular tastes, and addresses the multi-authored
experience of the contributors of The Journal of the Identical Lunch, an artist book comprised of
different encounters with performing Identical Lunch.
Knowles is included in a number of anthologies and exhibition catalogues in brief, but
there is a limited amount of in-depth individual scholarship that examines her work.

Nicole L.
Woods is including her dissertation on Knowles in her first monograph, and art historian Kristine
Stiles and Julia Robertson have written essays on Knowles’ performative and food-based
practice.
8
However, to date, there have been no major exhibitions, nor monographs of Knowles’
work, although at the age of eighty-three she is still actively performing and creating objects.
After a brief introduction to Knowles’ biography and her relationship to Fluxus, I will
discuss the origins of Make A Salad and Identical Lunch. This will set the foundation for how the
artist presented these works early on. I will then examine the cooking-doing of these two pieces
in relation to women’s work and the recipe card as an event score. I will follow with recent
iterations of both Make A Salad and Identical Lunch, and culminate with the problem of recent
presentations of the work. In this thesis I hope to show that even though Knowles has authored a

8
Nicole Lynn Woods, “Performing chance: Alison Knowles, Fluxus, and the enigmatic work of art,” (PhD
diss., University of California, Irvine, 2010) ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing, (3404599). Art historian
Kristine Stiles and Julia Robertson have written essays on Knowles’ performative and food-based practice. See
Kristine Stiles, “Tuna and Other Fishy Thoughts on Fluxus Events,” in Indigo Island: Art works by Alison Knowles
(Dillingen: Stadtgalerie Saabücken, 1995) and Julia Robinson, “The Sculpture of Indeterminacy: Alison Knowles's
Beans and Variations” Art Journal; Winter (2004): 97-115.

6

score, she intends for the score to remain open and to be interpreted and infinitively performed
by others. Through this future-minded multiplicity of audience, a communal thread is pulled
through all of the participants and, as the number of participants increases, so does the intense
blurring of art and life. These food-based scores demand active participation using multiple
senses, ultimately culminating in a complete experience within the consuming body. The
blurring of art and life can be represented not only in each consuming body, but also by the
collective corporeal experience of the entire audience for these two works.

Alison Knowles was raised in Scarsdale, NY and as a child she was constantly
surrounded by books. Her father was a professor who studied the work of Thomas Shelton, the
first translator of Don Quixote. Knowles began her college education in the 1950s as a French
major at Middlebury College. After being denied a scholarship to travel to France while waiting
tables in the French dorms at Middlebury, she decided to change her major to art, as drawing was
something she enjoyed doing as a child. Because of her father’s teaching position she was able to
study at Pratt Institute in New York City without being charged tuition. In the day school, she
studied painting, book illustration and graphic arts with Richard Linder. In the night school she
studied with Adolph Gottlieb, and through him was exposed to the Abstract Expressionists at
gallery openings. During a class at Syracuse University, her teacher, former Bauhaus artist
Joseph Albers, separated her from the other students because he did not want her strong
figurative paintings to influence them. He stated that she was a talented painter, regardless.
9
She
graduated in 1956, she took at job at Norcross Greeting Cards, stenciling roses. She then worked
as a small layout and paste-up artist at a Prince Street Production house. Laying out

9
Hannah Higgins, “Love's Labor's Lost and Found: A Meditation on Fluxus, Family, and Somethings Else”
Art Journal, Vol. 69, No. 1/2 (2010): 12-13.

7

advertisements, and ordering typeface gave her the technical skills she later used in not only her
art practice, but also at Something Else Press. Though her work at that time was abstract, she was
trained to draw the figure and continued to make paintings until 1961, when she intentionally
destroyed all but two of her paintings by burning them.
Alison Knowles’ husband, Dick Higgins, took John Cage’s “Course in Experimental
Composition” at the New School for Social Research between 1958-1959 with George Brecht,
Allan Kaprow, and Al Hanson, among others.
10
Although Knowles herself did not attend the
class, she absorbed many of the principles that were presented in it through her interaction with
this group of artists, many of whom would later become her associates in Fluxus. In Cage’s
class, students learned about his philosophy of indeterminacy and chance operations: anything
that happens during the performance of a piece becomes part of the work.

Cage’s now-famous
score 4’33”(1952), for example, calls for a performer to sit in front of a piano for four minutes
and thirty-three seconds “playing” a very long rest. Cage’s intention in this piece was to isolate
the subtle dynamics of sound in the room and among members of the audience during the
traditional periods of rest in a performances of classical music. Without an actual music score,
the ambient sounds that occur in the room during 4’33” become the focus.
It was through Cage’s influence that Brecht produced his first scores for events in the late
1950s: a simple set of instructions written on a single note card that could be carried out by
anyone, framing everyday actions as minimal performances. Art was taken out of the realm of
single authorship and into the realm of infinite authors who could perform and/or experience
very simple everyday actions. Knowles became interested in the Zen-like brevity, simplicity and
democracy of Brecht’s event scores.
Knowles’ work fit perfectly into the definition of a range of early 1960s interdisciplinary

8

practices that Higgins defined as “intermedia”—work that is not just conceptually between
media, but also between different disciplines, dipping into everyday life. “This is the interdial
approach, to emphasize the dialectic between the media.”
The ready-made or found object, in a sense an intermedium since it was not
intended to conform to the pure medium, usually suggests this, and therefore
suggests a location in the field between the general area of art media and those of
life media. However, at this time, the locations of this sort are relatively
unexplored, as compared with media between the arts. I cannot, for example,
name work where has consciously been placed in the intermedium between
painting and shoes.
11

Working in the area between what Higgins calls “art media” and “life media” is the
hallmark of the eclectic group of visual artists, composers and poets who became associated with
Fluxus. George Maciunas selected the name Fluxus to describe the fluidity in the types of work
produced by these international collaborators who placed an emphasis on a definition of art using
simple event scores and to be performed by anyone using everyday objects.
12
Maciunas
produced the first Fluxus festivals throughout Europe in 1962 with the assistance of Nam Jun
Paik (who was living in Berlin) and Higgins. Though Fluxus included women within its ranks,
Knowles was the only woman who took part in all of the Fluxus Festivals from 1962-1963.
After this initial wave of festivals, Knowles continued to work collaboratively with other
members of Fluxus. Maciunas began to organize and produce small, accessible multiples in the
form of Fluxkits. These affordable objects were available through mail order, a means of
decentralizing the distribution and denying the preciousness of the art object. Knowles produced

10
Higgins, The Fluxus Experience, 1.

11
Dick Higgins. “Statement on Intermedia.” In Dé-coll/age (décollage) * 6, ed. Wolf Vostell. (Typos
Verlag: Frankfurt New York: Something Else Press, 1967).
12
According to Dick Higgins, “Fluxus is not a moment in history, or an art movement. Fluxus is a way of
doing things, a tradition, and a way of life and death.” I bring this up in regards to the difficulty and complexity of
outlining and describing the convoluted history of Fluxus. Many people associated themselves with Fluxus for only
a short period of time. This simplified history is to frame Knowles’ work along with her contemporaries. Ken

9

Bean Rolls for the first Fluxkit in 1963. (fig. #3) A “canned book” of sorts, Bean Rolls consisted
of a tea tin filled with fourteen paper rolls imprinted with information about beans. Knowles’
research consisted of visiting the New York Public Library’s card catalogues and gathering
information available about beans: recipes including beans, people named Bean and
advertisements from the department store LL Bean. Bean Rolls also included actual beans, so the
piece presented an auditory component when the can was shaken. This work was the first of
many that incorporated beans. It chronicles the usage of ordinary materials as her medium.

Figure 3: Bean Rolls, (1963)

The objects that i investigate in my work are found in the street or are very
familiar and come from daily use.
the more real and ordinary they are, the more interesting they become to me.
they offer clues to reality and have become the stuff of my art.
i observe, examine and collect.
i present no specific meanings or theories about these little things that come my
way…. that are just waiting for me to pick them up.
13

Friedman, “Introduction: A Transformative Vision of Fluxus,” in The Fluxus Reader, ed. Ken Friedman. (New
York: Academy Editions, 1988), viii.
13
Invitation for Objects in Hand, presented at Stichting ‘de appel’, Amerstdam, May 1976, Jean Brown
Papers, Box 28, Folder 38, The Getty Research Institute.

10

From the beginning of her practice, Knowles utilized items and rituals from her everyday
life in her scores and objects. Nivea Cream Piece (1962) consisted of the first performer pouring
Nivea Cream onto “his hands, and massages them in front of the microphone.”
14
Multiple
performers enter the stage and “join together in front of the microphone to make a mass of
massaging hand.”
15
Child Art Piece (1962) portrays the simple relationship between a child and
his or her parents. The performance is over when the child leaves the stage. Braid (1964) simply
states “The performers, usually two, find something to braid, hair, yarn, etc. and do so.”
16

Knowles emphasized the inclusive, all-encompassing nature of Fluxus beliefs by using objects
that are part of her everyday life. Knowles, the author, became “a kind of archivist, a statistician,
someone who merely names things already existing in the world.”
17
Though the objects varied
drastically — cream, beans, hair — it was their banality that fascinated her most. These common
objects are so overlooked in day-to-day life, when Knowles activates them in a ritualized manner
by singling them out, she draws attention to their potential exceeding our typical understanding
of them.
The inclusive nature of the works could have been produced by any of the Fluxus
members, but there is a subtle feminine sensibility to all of Knowles’ work. Beginning with the
early pieces and progressing throughout her career, the work explores perceptions of food,
nourishment and care taking — raising questions about how women are often charged with care-
taking and nurturing others, especially through food and cooking. She constructed The Big Book
(1967), presenting her specific domestic environment. The “reader” could walk through and
interact with an environment consisting of large pages. The pages included vignettes of her

14
Alison Knowles, By Alison Knowles (New York: Something Else Press, 1965): 3.
15
Ibid., 3.
16
Ibid., 4.

11

everyday loft life: a stove, a teakettle, a chair and a toilet. Knowles once again pulled inspiration
from her surroundings, giving an account of the everyday rituals she performed including her
role as a caretaker of others, and blurring the line between art and life.
Identical Lunch and Make a Salad push this notion of nourishment in particular. In both
of these, Knowles actually presents an opportunity to feed and nourish the body of the
participant. Identical Lunch touches upon the industrial food system: tuna, a canned and
processed food, is a cornerstone of convenience. The sandwich, eaten at a diner offers a moment
of respite in the midst of a busy work day. By utilizing fresh and sustainable produce, Make a
Salad, in contrast, references nature. It brings food preparation out of the kitchen and into a
public space. Both are about communal eating, sharing food and nourishing the body.

PROPOSITION # 2, MAKE A SALAD (1962)
The simple score for Proposition #2, Make a Salad was originally performed at the
Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London on October 21, 1962. In that first performance,
Knowles stood on stage and chopped the ingredients for a salad. The salad was served out of a
wooden tub to a small audience. The piece was realized in the midst of Knowles’ other early
sound works, Nivea Cream Piece, Shuffle, and Shoes of Your Choice, and followed the concert
format used in the early Fluxus festivals: the performers are on stage while the audience is seated
to view the performance. During Make a Salad the sounds produced from chopping vegetables
and preparing the meal become analogous to the notes of a musical score. By watching Knowles’
labor in cutting the vegetables, the piece brought attention to the sounds that are produced when
preparing a salad. These sounds, though always part of any ordinary meal preparation, are

17
Kristine Stiles, “Tuna and Other Fishy Thoughts on Fluxus Events,” in Indigo Island: Art works by

12

usually ignored. By isolating the rhythmic motion of chopping Knowles intensified the simplistic
nature of making a salad.
Make a Salad came to fruition because of what was happening in Knowles’ life in a
particular moment. In a conversation with Higgins, Knowles states:
There is a chance element. What someone else will add to the salad. I remember it
was over lunch in London when I got that idea. You were so enthusiastic. I never
would have done it without your enthusiasm. It’s that you ask me the right
questions or something. Eating, and preparation for that event, came from what
we were doing in our very lives at that moment.
18

The spontaneity of the work mimics the spontaneity of everyday life. The ingredients of the salad
were purchased on the day of the performance, and after the dressing was added, eating
commenced. Although the score does not explicitly state it, the salad is always eaten. This is one
of the ways in which Knowles differs from her contemporaries working with food during this
time. Higgins recalled, “I remember you performing that piece in London and in Copenhagen in
the early Fluxus days, and noticing, afterwards, that other artists began doing things with food
also. With you it became a community effort, a communication with each other and the
audience/eaters.”
19
During the first programmed Fluxus festivals, Knowles’ scores allowed the
audience to become a component of the work and her practice of using food emphasized
inclusivity as important and unique to her practice at that moment.
20

While other artists have used food in their practice before 1962, Knowles was one of the
first to incorporate communal eating into the vernacular of art making. In part, her work is about
hospitality, not only as a means of bringing bodies together to converse, but of genuinely

Alison Knowles (Dillingen: Stadtgalerie Saabücken, 1995), 34.
18
Unpublished interview between Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles, 1977, page 3. Dick Higgins Papers,
Box 85, Folder 18, Northwestern University.
19
Ibid., 3-4.
20
There are many other artists who use food in their art practice. Barbara T. Smith served food in 1968 as
part of a performance entitled Ritual Meal. Artists Rirkrit Tiravanija and Michael Rakowitz use food and are most

13

enjoying the food. Though Make a Salad does not specifically instruct the participant to eat the
salad, the salad is edible and therefore is consumed. Knowles’ work with food differs in
comparison to most of her contemporaries because of its edibility: everything is eaten, which
means nothing is wasted.
Conversely, Dick Higgins’ score for Danger Music Number Fifteen (1962) reads “Work
with butter and eggs for a time.” While the tactile quality of the objects become prominent, the
raw ingredients of the score render the piece inedible in the end and the food goes to waste.
Dieter Roth commonly produced sculptures out of food products like bread and chocolate, but
because they were exposed to the elements, eventually they decayed, portraying a different
aspect of the lifecycle rather than being consumed by the human body. Though these artists did
use food to bridge the relationship between art and life, the emphasis is not placed on the
consuming body. While Higgins’ score is the basis for many baking recipes, and Roth produced
a thoroughfare moments where people could monitor the process of decay in the sculptures,
neither of these place the audience in the active role of eating. In Knowles work, she emphasizes
the performativity of the daily habit of people eating and consuming food, the frames it as art in
the spirit of.
In Make a Salad, the audience participates by eating the salad after watching it being
prepared; this communal aspect of the piece brings attention to the labor that goes into it. When
the participant views this labor, that knowledge is transferred to the food as it is consumed. The
piece was usually performed as the last score of a performance schedule. Once everyone else had
performed, Knowles would make the salad and as people rose from their seats to eat the salad
and mingle, the evening would conclude in a relaxed manner. The preparation of the food

commonly assoicated with Realational Aesthetics of the 1990s. Though many artists feed participants, Knowles is
one of the firsts to do so deliberatly. She set the precendent for artist such as Tiravanija and Rakowitz.

14

became the visual focus of the event. Coming together to share an eating experience mimics the
process of gathering at the dinner table in a domestic setting. In a way, by removing the food
preparation from the kitchen, Knowles has removed an aspect of domesticity from the cooking
process. The food is prepared in the same space as it is consumed: the work and the labor
becomes visible.
21

Make a Salad was performed in multiple venues. On October 23, 1967, Knowles,
Higgins and Cage contributed to the Inaugural Performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art
Chicago’s new building with an evening of performances entitled, “What did you bring?” The
performances took place at Second City, a comedy club and cabaret theatre. They produced a
small booklet (fig. #4) that whimsically described the performances, including Higgins’ Danger
Music Number Seventeen and Cage’s mushroom performance:
proposition alison knowles.
…“make a salad”… waring
blended dressing from spices and oils
found in Chicago…nothing imported but
the chef…salad unique to this performance.

This small excerpt shows the importance of food in relation to the body and location in
this particular iteration of Make a Salad. Though written in 1967, the language and concept seem
quite contemporary: many artists today respond to a specific area when presenting food-based
works.
22
What Knowles was responding to was the immediacy of an area, how specific resources
could be utilized and how everyday accessible objects deserved our time and attention. Salads
are salads everywhere, but the chance operations lead to subtle variation; the small differences in

21
In 1964, Knowles made a variation to the score that progressed into Variation #1, Make a Soup. It
premiered on November 9, 1964 at Café au Go Go in New York. Though similar to Proposition #2, this score
produced a pot of soup at the end of the performance instead. It is more difficult to perform because the time needed
to make a soup is much greater than making a salad, and therefore is not performed often.
22
For example, Los Angles collective Fallen Fruit responds to an area based on the need of the
communities or what fruit is iconic to that particular area.

15

local flora imprint locality onto the larger scope of consumption. Knowles’ connectivity to her
body and the food she ingested, and her emphasis using simple, fresh salad ingredients
inadvertently placed her at the forefront of a turning counterculture change in which Americans
began to pay attention to health and organic practices in their food habits.
23

Figure 4: What did you bring? Pamphlet, 1967

Knowles’s background and eating habits are crucial in understanding why the use of
fresh, available resources is essential to Make a Salad. It was John Cage who informed not only
her formal practice, but also her interest in food. Higgins, also a lover of food, went with Cage
on foraging trips hosted by the mycological society in New York.
24
Eventually, Higgins
introduced Knowles to Cage and the three foraged for mushrooms together. These forages were

23
The late 1960s brought awareness to issues of sustainability and localism as topics of discourse. This
eventually lead to artist-run restaurants such as Gordon Matta-Clark and Carol Gooden’s FOOD, and the beginning
of farm-to-table eating at Alice Water’s Chez Panisse beginning in the early 1970s. But Knowles was interested in
using fresh, local foods well before this movement began.

16

the beginning of a deep friendship encompassing shared recipes and meals. For years Knowles
and Cage maintained a macrobiotic diet together. They collaborated on projects and exchanged
ideas, but also fed each other, cooked and provided nourishment for each other’s bodies, and
extended and strengthened their relationship through food and art.
Knowles’ friendship with Cage exposed her to different eating habits and new places in
the city, where they would go to explore their culinary interests. These wanderings were what
brought Knowles to the Chinatown markets to buy fresh, seasonal ingredients, along with an
array of imported non-American health food like seaweed and tofu.
25
This was during a time in
America when conservative tastes made it difficult to find an array of fresh vegetables in
markets. A simple salad would have not been an everyday staple of the American diet.
Performance and theatricality are two major aspects of Make a Salad. The event score
was always supposed to be performed in front of an audience, and in recent years the work has
involved very large audiences in diverse contexts, including museums such as Tate Modern and
the Walker Art Center, and public spaces like The High Line, which will be discussed later.
Historically, it was Knowles who made the salad, but in these recent enactments the performance
included multiple performers chopping the ingredients to make the salad. What was the labor of
one became the labor of many. This progression to include more and more performers and larger
audiences is also chronicled within the history of the Identical Lunch.

24
John Cage reinstated the current Mycological Chapter in New York City some fifty years ago.
25
Alison Knowles in conversation with author, June 10, 2015.

17

IDENTICAL LUNCH, (1967)
Identical Lunch, first realized in 1967, has been performed in various manifestations to
the present day.
26
In 1969, Knowles shared a studio on the third floor of her home with the
composer Philip Corner who noticed she ate the same thing everyday for lunch at Riss Foods
Diner in Chelsea and suggested she make a piece about it.
27
Knowles says, “[Corner] caught me
eating the same lunch at the same time at the same place each day. From that day on, the
experience was elevated into a formal score. I was able to name it, claim it, detach it from
myself, look at it, write it up or leave it alone.”
28
Identical Lunch is a perfect example of how a
simple ritual can evolve into a performance work. According to Knowles:
At that point we realized that I was somehow involved in a performance.
I usually had four or five people come and eat the lunch. The respect that I had for
that hour and for the people I ate with had to do with the fact that we were doing
mutual work as artists and writers. The reactions and the way people ate it and
how they felt about it were extremely different. I found it very interesting that
Florence and the other waitresses took considerable interest and questioned what I
was doing, always having this tuna fish sandwich. For me to say, “It's actually a
piece of performance art, “ made me a completely mysterious object to them.
29

Knowles took this everyday ritual, her small respite from when she enjoyed not only the
company of others but fueled her body with food, and framed it into an art practice. Through
this, she formed a community of people at the café with different taste preferences and different
receptions. Though the lunch she ate was never identical, the consumption of it became a ritual.
It is the matter of ritual and specifically and an attention to the everyday where we see a Zen
influence in Knowles and Fluxus.

26
Knowles had been eating the lunch before she composed the event score for it. For this thesis, I refer the
original date of the piece as 1967, though the dates range from 67-69 in other mentions of Identical Lunch.
27
Knowles and Corner shared a studio space on the third floor of her domestic space.
28
Introduction of the book written by Alison Knowles in 1972. Philip Corner, The Identical Lunch,
(Barton: Nova Broadcast Press, 1973), 1.
29
Stephanie Smith, ed. Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art (Chicago: Smart Museum of Art,
University of Chicago, 2013), 70.

18

What the two [Zen and Fluxus] hold in common is an insistent attitude of
questioning: a revelation of the codes by which we come to frame the world, by
which we come to receive the world as given and immutable. This questioning,
unfolding through demonstration rather than discourse, indicates a cognitive shift
away from the modernist understanding of the self as the inviolate center of
being.
30

Through eating the lunch everyday, and by the relationships spawned by this simple act,
Knowles became part of a larger social and economic system. Knowles’ project shows an
appreciation of the quotidian and attention to the simple actions of life. When the body becomes
a consuming force, then there is an added awareness of ones’ surroundings. The full body
becomes activated when eating. The movement of the jaws applies pressure as the food is
masticated, and muscle contractions push the food along into the stomach. As the stomach fills,
the comforting sensation of fullness places the body in a relaxed state. After digestion, excrement
is expelled from the body during defecation completing a corporal awareness of the self. These
bodily acts are experienced in relation to the situations occurring outside the body.
The score was not only performed, but the experiences of it were published. The first
time the piece manifested itself in writing was in the Outsider publication in the spring of 1968.
It included Knowles’ account of her meals with all of the “characters” of the performance written
about in short hand.
31
She documented the slight variations that occurred with each performance.
The text is tight on the page, with no paragraphs or indentations and it reads like a continuous
piece, the different lunches merging together as one.
Knowles expanded the solo performance to form a collective experience of consumption
by publishing The Journal of the Identical Lunch (1971). (fig. #5) As Corner described it in The

30
David T. Doris, “Zen Vaudeville: A Medi(t)ation in the Margins of Fluxus” in The Fluxus Reader, ed.
Ken Friedman. (New York: Academy Editions, 1988) 6. Consult for further reading on the influence of Zen
Buddhism on Fluxus ideology.
31
For example: P – Pauline, head waitress at Riss; L – Greek cashier turned part-time cook; N – Alison
Knowles; G – Philip Corner

19

Identical Lunch, “It has to do with an attitude to food, attitude to life. A simple documentation
and so revealing, about the ‘authors,’ and the ‘eaters’ the thing which is the thing sustaining the
life, the eating of it. This general place, this food that everyone eats. There can be an insistence
on the extraordinary which has as its source the sense of a self of being special.”
32
This artist
book was a collection of not only Knowles’ own accounts of the performance but also the
writings and experiences of her collaborators. As is common in Knowles’ practice, she opens her
work to be experienced and performed by many. Working closely with her editor Jan Herman
she writes, “I had meant the lunches to come off as one to one between the reader and the
performer, like looking through a keyhole and seeing the most ordinary events, how much is
revealed that is extraordinary, that people almost didn’t realize they were saying. This definitely
happened.”
33
The participants’ candor is astonishing. The pages are filled with personal
anecdotes: more than one person’s distaste for tuna, another person acid trip and small intimate
glances into the participant’s lives as they recount the experience of their specific meal.

32
Corner, The Identical Lunch, 26.
33
Alison Knowles to Jan Herman, Dec. 4, 1971, Jan Herman Papers, Box 6, Folder 6, Northwestern
University.

20

Figure 5: The Journal of the Identical Lunch, 1971

Each of the participants brought to the work a unique and different relationship with tuna
fish as they performed the score. As Allen Weiss explains the challenge in coming to a
consensus about taste in “Paradigms of Taste”:
Taste is simultaneously subjective, objective, and qualificative. According to
context, taste means: the sense by which we distinguish flavors; the flavors
themselves; an appetite for such preferred flavors; the discriminative activity
according to which an individual likes or dislikes certain sensations; the
sublimation of such value judgments as they pertain to art, and ultimately to all
experience; and, by extension and ellipsis, taste implies good taste and style,
established by means of an intuitive faculty of judgment.
34

The performers came to the counter with pre-conceived taste preferences. Susan Hartung
wrote, “I think tuna fish sandwiches are shitty. I like raw tuna, in thin slices, with Japanese

34
Allen Weiss, “Paradigms of Taste,” in Taste Nostalgia, ed. Allen S Weiss (New York: Lusitania Press,
1997), 7.

21

horseradish.”
35
Personal sensibilities and taste bud preferences get carried into the score. But the
verbal language we possess makes it difficult to explain these preferences and what the food
actually tastes like. Joel C. Kuipers communicates the difficulties in explaining how taste works:
“In the end, attempts to determine basic taste terms on cultural grounds alone may end in little
agreement. But more important for this discussion is to stress how unusual it is, in ordinary
discourse, to use taste words at all.”
36
When writing about their experiences, the performers’
notion of the taste of the meal came second to the environments surrounding the meal. The
performers in fact picked up what Knowles was implying about the small variations surrounding
this simple score. The food was not solely identified by descriptions of taste alone, but by
descriptions of the situations that surrounded it and the people eating it, which is what makes the
Journal of the Identical Lunch such an interesting piece of gastronomical writing. For example,
D. Hollingworth writes in his entry, “I decided I didn’t like tuna fish anymore. Spent more time
talking than looking.”
37
Here, the sandwich was disregarded and the act of conversing became
the focus. Unlike restaurant reviews, these retellings of eating experiences focus on the
environment and context rather than on the actual taste of the food being eaten.
In Identical Lunch Knowles invites the performer to experience the lunch at a diner or
restaurant. The ambiance of the space and the situation of dining alone or with another frames
the conditions in which the lunch is to be consumed. Kuipers again explains “Another kind of
marking of tastes words is situational…the social visit is an event in which food evaluation is at
issue, and there is heightened awareness of tastes.”
38
Because the lunch has been highlighted as
an event score, and framed within an art context, this social situation highlights what occurs in

35
Knowles, Alison The Journal of The Identical Lunch, (San Francisco: Nova Broadcast Press, 1971), 49.
36
Joel C. Kuipers, “Matter of Tastes in Weyéwa,” in The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in
the Anthropology of the Senses, ed. David Howes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 119.
37
Knowles, The Journal of The Identical Lunch, 56.

22

the performers’ mouths. Specific tastes and the acknowledgement of the surrounding
environment are connected to heightened awareness of eating. Kupiers continues, “[p]erhaps
because so much of the human experience of the world is mediated by the visual and auditory
channels, especially in adult life, it is especially likely that when taste experiences become a
subject of attention, they are situationally and linguistically ‘marked.’
39
Knowles has “marked”
these lunches within an art context; as a participant eats, the food becomes connected to the
event score. While the performers are eating the sandwich, those specific tastes and total bodily
experiences are now associated with the score. The experience of the score itself does not only
occur as the piece is being performed, but also in the lingering memory of it every time a tuna
fish sandwich is eaten.
In Higgins’ comments about Identical Lunch, he portrayed himself as a suspect in some
sort of mystery. Higgins focused on the taste of the meal, describing himself in the third person,
by writing, “[p]ossibly the acridness of canned tuna fish did not please him, or the cottonseed oil
in which the tuna was apparently packed may have disturbed his apparently wiggly stomach.”
40

Since the sense of taste is highly unique from person to person, the words and concepts
associated with it are in constant flux. In the third century BC, for example, Aristotle listed seven
basic qualities of tastes: sweet, sour, bitter, salty, astringent, pungent, and harsh.
41
Sensation on
the tongue and the words used to describe them depend not only on individual taste receptors,
but also on how each culture and time period frames their concepts of taste. The amount and
words associated to tastes categories change drastically throughout history. Compared to

38
Kuipers, “Matter of Tastes in Weyéwa,” 120-121.
39
Ibid., 120.
40
Knowles, The Journal of The Identical Lunch, 4-5.
41
Kuipers, “Matter of Tastes in Weyéwa,” 117.

23

Aristotle’s time, an estimation of subtle range of taste in the West has diminished notably: we
currently identify with only four basic categories of taste: sweet, sour, bitter and salty.
42

Beyond his taste experience, Higgins commented specifically on the preparation of the
tuna, “In texture…the tuna fish had been altered so that, unlike tuna straight from the can, the
usual resemblance to the dissected frogs of high school biology classes had disappeared: instead
it had been pulped and mashed into something viscous, like melted ice cream.”
43
Mouthfeel is
extremely important when dealing with food-based works. The texture of the tuna in Identical
Lunch, for Higgins, had a particular relationship to his tongue, and this relationship affected his
response to the score. What to Knowles was the best thing on the menu might have been, in fact,
to the next consumer the worst thing on the menu, regardless that the sandwich is “identical.”
The chance operations that occur every time the score is performed are replicated in each
individual who performs the piece.
Not all of the submissions in The Journal of The Identical Lunch revolve around the taste
of the meal. Tom Wasmuth’s entry was solely based on the tiles on the floor at Riss Foods. Once
he went to the diner to perform the score, he meticulously plotted and compared the floors to
another venue called the White Diamond. His entry did not mention the meal at all. All of the
entries are vignettes of the performances: a recollection and remembrance of the many layers of
an event. After performing the piece, Vernon Hinkle returned home to type up his experience. At
the end of his retelling, strike–throughs and all, he typed, “[c]ertain details have been
unconsciously eliminated, as they always are.”
44
Identical Lunch presents a moment to just

42
Though, it could be argued that now there are five tastes with the introduction of “umami” into the
vernacular of Western culture. I will argue that not enough time has passed for it to be considered as commonly as
the prior four. Regardless, perception of tastes in relationship to language is constantly changing.
43
Knowles, The Journal of The Identical Lunch, 5.
44
Knowles, The Journal of The Identical Lunch, 9.

24

experience a simple act. When the act is recalled casually, the mind will only conjure the details
that have been retained.
Knowles’ contribution is the longest in the book, predictably. Her individual entries are
separated by date and end with the price of the meal and the tip. The entries are thoughtful,
reflecting on the consistency of the meal alongside the staff serving the lunch. By including the
price, she makes apparent the larger consumer commodity of the lunch. Knowles describes the
idiosyncrasies that occur in a place of business when one becomes a regular. These small
variations in the attitudes of the workers and inconstancies of the food and service would not
become apparent unless specific thought and attention was given to the event. By establishing
the parameters of the event score, Knowles was able to examine even more closely her everyday
environment.
John Giorno has continued the meticulous notation that Knowles established. He has
documented the largest group performance of Identical Lunch since the time that The Journal of
The Identical Lunch was originally printed in 1971. Not everyone is able to sit together at the
counter for lunch and he notes, “[g]lancing toward the Swede two seats away, she sees what a
nice random line the group has created.”
45
The group of people performed the piece at the same
time, but were separated by seats of customers not taking place in the event score. Since the
performers were participating in an Identical Lunch event score, they were connected by this
invisible thread that connects all performers of the score.
At the very end of The Journal of the Identical Lunch, following the advertisements of
other publications, is an entry by Bici Hendricks:
30 July, 1964. Birth of Tyche. All day long in labor, unable to eat, excited,
exhausted, ravenous the vision of tuna salad on whole wheat dominated my
thoughts. Later Geoff brought me one

45
Ibid., 30.

25

2 August. Beth Israel hospital. Tuna salad on whole wheat is inextricably
associated with birth and death of children.
46

This last entry most closely merges the body with the performance. She recalls the birth
of her son and of her bodily cravings for food while her body was preparing to undergo labor.
This was a moment when her body was in an extreme test of endurance and under the highest
stress possible. When she does perform Identical Lunch, the taste of the tuna salad triggers the
memory of childbirth when the same sandwich offered her much needed physical nourishment.
“Taste” becomes irrelevant in this somatic experience; this sensation of tuna salad is connected
to the body in a manner that is deeper than superficial taste receptors.
Philip Corner’s obsession with the Identical Lunch culminated in his own artist book with
the same title. The book was produced at the same time as The Journal of the Identical Lunch,
and was in dialogue with the original publication, though it was printed several years later. He
writes, “I’ve just seen Alison’s entry published by The Loujon Press in which she does pretty
much stick to the sandwich. Anyway it’s great. She’s gotten in some pretty fantastic things with
the buttermilk.”
47
His version mostly considers his own relationship to the score and how the
lunch punctuates his life. He takes a different approach to the score and orders everything on the
menu at Riss Foods: this is the way he was able to differentiate himself from Knowles and in
turn sustain a relationship with the workers at the diner. He does often refer to and includes
Knowles in the writing, as he eats and interacts with her, he makes apparent their gendered
interactions and social relations. He begins the book by identifying Knowles with both her
maiden name Alison Knowles, and her married name of Mrs. Higgins. He only addresses her as
Mrs. Higgins when she has to stay home with the children when they were home on a snow day

46
Ibid., 65.
47
Corner, The Identical Lunch. 32. The Loujon Press was the press for Outsider magazine. He was
referring to the first time that the lunch was printed.

26

(a jab at her responsibilities). As long as she is a peer and is able to perform the score, Corner
uses her maiden name.
The score for Identical Lunch originated at a specific time and place and was related to
Knowles’ body during that particular period of time. Knowles has mentioned that she tried
everything on the menu at Riss Foods, but decided the tuna was the best thing, which is why she
ate it everyday. Her specific taste receptors were integral to the conception of the score. The
score points to and emphasizes a specific way of eating by a particular artist living in New York
in the late 1960s. The option of buttermilk or soups was part of the original score: however even
within a few years after the initial performances, buttermilk was no longer available at Riss
Foods. While the score continues to be performed according to the original event score, the
social history of those food items has shifted over the years. Due to changing food fads, the piece
and its score have become linked to a very specific time period and place.
48

Just as food trends change, so has the reception of the piece. In the case of Identical
Lunch two things happen simultaneously: since the score is open, it is not being re-performed, or
represented. Instead, the score is enacted every time it is performed. As Martha Buskrirk, Amelia
Jones and Caroline Jones have noted in their article, “The Year in ‘Re-’”, “Enactment implies
unfettered access to an original script or score, and a close relation (if not identity as) the original
artist.”
49
Therefore, as in the case of Identical Lunch, since there is access to the original score
every iteration is. Technically, an enactment.
50

48
Tuna was canned in 1903, and it belongs to a specific group of foods unique to the Twentieth Century.
World War I increased demand for the canned fish since it was a high-protein and portable food for the soldiers.
Later, it was sold as a cheap food to the masses. For further information see Andrew S Smith, American Tuna: The
Rise and Fall of an Improbable Food, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
49
Burskirk, Martha, Amelia Jones and Caroline A. Jones, “The Year in “Re-” Artforum.com, December
2013. https://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201310&id=44068
50
Make a Salad is also included in this reading.

27

As if expanding on this theoretical point, Knowles built repetition into the original score:
“…[the sandwich] was and is eaten many days of each week at the same place at about the same
time.” Corner observed the repetition; Knowles officially framed it as art with a score; and
subsequent documentation and objects were made as a result of the score. The piece, in is
inception, had an air of multiplicity built into its score. The organic nature of this concept
fostered the multiple formats that the score embodied (the artist books) and the art objects
Knowles later produced in conjunction to the performances. This repetitive quality extended into
the public and the multiple enactments.
The structure of Knowles’ life set the parameters for her to perform Identical Lunch with
such regularity. Knowles was employed at Something Else Press, a small press that produced
artist books and various other publications initiated by Higgins. The press ran from 1963 to 1974
and produced books by John Cage, Marshall McLuhan, Jay Johnson and others. The press also
produced the Great Bear series of books which sold for $1 each and which included two books of
Knowles’ scores. She was the editor for Cages’ famous 1969 book, Notations. The regularity of
her work at the press allowed her the freedom to perform Identical Lunch at her midday break.
When artists came to Something Else Press for a project or to collaborate, Knowles would often
take them to lunch. Since she was working, she did not always have the time to provide meals for
the family. As she noted, “[t]he Identical Lunch was a way for me to take people from the
Something Else office, where Dick was talking to them, and take them out of the office, out to
Chelsea to the Riss Foods and just chat with them, and to get them a little more relaxed maybe,
in what they were doing.”
51
This gesture of hospitality evolved from her daily life and the score
she developed was directly related to the events in her everyday world.

51
Alison Knowles in conversation with author, June 10, 2015.

28

Though she partook in this noon-time ritual nearly every day, she still cooked in her own
kitchen at home. Knowles cooked for groups quite often.
52
But as Hannah Higgins has
commented, Alison was “not a woman who wanted to be sequestered off in a kitchen.”
53
For
Knowles, the communal gathering of eating is vital for experiencing food, as for the environment
to be comforting and welcoming. Her loft in Chelsea sported a low table with pillows. Food was
often cooked at the table in a ubiquitous red electric wok, which allowed the food to be cooked at
the table instead of in the kitchen. Everyone witnessed the labor of the meal, and Knowles was
able to interact with her guests instead of preparing food in a separate space. As Knowles has
noted of this method: “I like it so much more than the way I grew up. In Scarsdale, New York we
had a high formal table, with candles. And the kitchen was over there and my mother would
bring the food in from the kitchen. And we would sit in these chairs with a white tablecloth. Very
formal.”
54
She did not want to replicate this formal type of eating, but instead wanted to create a
casual and comfortable situation where the diners and cook were in the same space.
The Fluxbanquets provided the opportunity for another communal experience of the
Identical Lunch. Fluxbanquets were planned by George Maciunas at his loft at 40 Wooster Street
and took place on Christmas Day 1967, on New Year’s Day in 1968 and 1969, and intermittently
until Maciunas’ death in 1978.
55
By using food, the feasts functioned as a gathering place for
artists without the pressures of performing. The food was used to create space by merging
differences under the rubric of congeniality.
56
The banquets were potlucks, where everyone had
to bring a food based around a theme Maciunas would select. In 1969, Knowles brought a

52
This is how the bean came to be used in her work. As she was often cooking for large groups of people,
and the bean was cheap and filling, and she knew how to prepare them. Julia Robinson, “The Sculpture of
Indeterminacy: Alison Knowles's Beans and Variations” Art Journal; Winter (2004): 97-115.
53
In conversation with Alison Knowles and Hannah Higgins, June 10, 2015
54
Alison Knowles in conversation with author, June 10, 2015.
55
Higgins, The Fluxus Experience, 46.

29

mashed bean dip that Maciunas entitled Shit Porridge. Because of the title given to the dish,
based on visual observation, rather than the actual taste of the dish, it was avoided by the
majority of the attendees.
For another Fluxbanquet, Knowles built a booth and served the Identical Lunch to guests,
and documented the act of mastication by taking Polaroids as performers ate the sandwiches and
soup. The visual documentation of the person consuming his or her lunch reflects back to that
specific communal gathering. A few years later Knowles revisited the Polaroids and produced
screenprints of the event. Focusing on the images of the performers, such as Ay-O, Maciunas,
Jan Herman and Shigeko Kubota, she paired each image of the lunch alongside that of the
StarKist logo. She produced two sets of these prints. The first group, printed in 1974, are white
with a black half tone and a blue StarKist logo in the lower left corner; the second set were
produced from 1988 until 1993/94 and are a school bus yellow with a green half tone. (fig. 6&7)
The run was a total of five prints. Knowles used the same film for both— as with her attitude
towards the use of food in her work, she is willing to let nothing go to waste. Knowles has
always been an object maker, and through these prints she is able to connect her performances to
relate two-dimensional art and an art experience.
57

56
Jim Drobnick, “Recipes for the Cube: Aromatic and Edible Practices in Contemporary Art,” in
Foodculture: Tasting Identities and Geographies in Art, ed. Barbara Fisher, (Toronto: YYZ Books, 1999), 76.
57
Taken from the syllabus from her class, Silk Screen, co-taught with Peter Van Riper, “The other aspect
of the shop is its concern with events and happenings, relating two-dimensional art to an experience art.”

30

Figure 11 and 12: Prints of the Identical Lunch

When Allan Kaprow invited both Knowles and Higgins to teach at the California Institute
of the Arts (CalArts) in 1970, because of her background in printmaking, Knowles ran the
printshop and taught classes called “silkscreen,” “black and white camera,” and “house of
dust.”
58
At this time, Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago were in the process of moving a
female-centric program from California State Fullerton to CalArts, entitled the Feminist Art
Program.
59
Knowles was not part of this program as she describes, “The issue there is that Judy
Chicago and Mariam Schapiro were saying I worked only with men, and I couldn’t. Because
they really thought I was on the wrong side of things. And when I was growing up, and living
with Dick and publishing, it was men who helped me.” Knowles had been able to pursue a
practice working almost exclusively with men, and therefore did not feel like there needed to be

58
Alison Knowles Course, 1970-1972 transcribed from Cal Arts Archive document from 1970-71
59
Judy Chicago founded the program in Fresno and ran it from 1970-71. In 1971, she co-founded the
program with Mariam Schapiro at CalArts. Guide to the California Institute of the Arts Feminist Art Materials
Collection 1971-2007, California Institute of the Arts Archive, Valencia, California.

31

a separation between the sexes to produce art. She did not to work with the Feminist Art Program
even though it has recently been argued by Nicole L. Woods that her practice incorporates
feminist tendencies.
60
Though she was not directly engaged with the Feminist Art Program, the
overall energy in the school certainly did have an impact on her and her students.
One of the things in my life that is rewarding for me now, is my relationships
(influence one might say) with young women students I had at CalArts—
B.Bloom and L. Mikulchik. To see how they live and what they are doing, and
that my work and image is very meaningful to them….Both have been able to
structure lifestyles outside male power structures in their personal life. This is
much harder for me given my profound heterosexual framework, but here they
can help me find the way.
61

In a letter to Higgins she wrote, “Cal Arts gave me some friends, some places to stay,
especially in the young women. There is no precedent for my lifestyle. I feel like I’m cutting
down trees and shoveling earth even for the next step.”
62
Knowles was living on a commune in
the midst of old orange groves in Piru, California while teaching at CalArts. Though she initially
moved to California with Higgins and the twins, after a short time, while in the process of
divorcing, Higgins moved back to Vermont with the children.
63
This allowed Knowles to travel,
perform and make work on her own, while Higgins stayed in Vermont with the children.
While in California, Knowles continued to perform Identical Lunch. In November 1971,
art historians Barbara Rose and Moira Roth organized a Duchamp Festival at University of
California, Irvine (UC Irvine).
64
It was not a scholarly conference per se but a series of events
honoring the influence of Marcel Duchamp that included an exhibition and various performances

60
Nicole Lynn Woods, “Performing chance: Alison Knowles, Fluxus, and the enigmatic work of art.”
Unfortunately this dissertation manuscript is currently inaccessible because the author is editing it for a forthcoming
publication . While the subject of Knowles and feminism is a huge question of great interest, it is not integral to the
topic or scope of this thesis.
61
Alison Knowles to Dick Higgins, Dec 11, 1974. Box 18 Folder 54, The Getty Research Institute.
62
Alison, Knowles to Dick Higgins, Monday, July 15. Dick Higgins Papers, Box 18 Folder 54, Getty
Research Institute.
63
Knowles and Higgins separated in 1970 and finalized the divorce in 1971. They later remarried in 1984.
64
Bonnie Clearwater, West Coast Duchamp, (Miami Beach: Grassfield Press), 1991.

32

on campus throughout the month of November. Bonnie Clearwater remembers that Knowles
“contributed a very pivotal piece to the show that posed all the questions one enjoys in
Duchamp.”
65
Knowles had worked directly with Duchamp to print his last edition of Coeur
Volants (1967) through Something Else Press. During their collaborative process, she would visit
Duchamp and show him color ink swatches for the flying heart print on blue paper. During
teatime one day, Duchamp’s wife Teeny picked out a swatch (the one that was eventually
selected for the print) and asked if it was a new work by him. Duchamp signed the swatch and
Knowles took it home. This was agreed to be more of a gesture than a piece of work, and was
included in the UC Irvine exhibition.
66
Duchamp was highly influential to Knowles in her use of
ready-made objects and materials.
For the Duchamp Festival Knowles performed Identical Lunch.
67
The performance
occurred shortly after The Journal of the Identical Lunch had been released. In a letter to Jan
Herman, Knowles notes, “[t]he Irvine performance was packed and quite exciting for us all.
From 12-2 we inundated 100 people or so with the Identical Lunch. They all sat and read your
edition at one time or another between performances and tapes, many were stolen etc.”
68
The
lunch was served in the art gallery at the University, and StarKist donated the tuna, in as a result
of her visit to their factory.
69
She had a student at CalArts, Josef Bodganovich, whose
grandfather had founded StarKist Tuna. Through Josef, she was able to visit the StarKist factory
in San Pedro. The company donated the tuna and Knowles gave them credit for their donation.

65
Ibid., 117
66
When speaking to the artist about this, she proceeded to tell me that she no longer has the swatch. It was
sold. Perhaps now it could be considered a piece since it entered a market.
67
Anteater Antics: Oddds and ends from Special Collections and Archives, UC Irvine Libraries, last
modified, March 15, 2015. https://ucisca.wordpress.com/2010/07/20/marcel-duchamp-festival-1971/.
68
Alison Knowles to Jan Herman, Dec. 4, 1971, Jan Herman Papers, Northwestern University.
69
Starkist stopped donating tuna because they thought Knowles was an imposter from Bumblebee after
Knowles asked to film in the factory.

33

This interaction is a potential source for the use of the StarKist logos in the Identical Lunch
screenprints.

The act of providing is at the core of Knowles’ works that include food. In Michel de
Certeau and Luce Giard’s essay, The Nourishing Arts in Food, the connection is made from the
labor of preparation to supporting their families. Food preparation and consumption are
connected to the everyday rituals that occur in the home. “In each case, doing-cooking is the
medium for a basic, humble, and persistent practice that is repeated in time and space, rooted in
the fabric of relationships to others and to one’s self, marked by the ‘family saga’ and the history
of each, bound to childhood memory just like rhythms and seasons.”
70
Knowles references these
small segments in women’s labor in other works as well. With Bean Rolls, which she called a
“canned book,” she used a tea tin to house the contents. Along with holding beans, it also
indexed a multitude of recipes and facts about beans. Once the tin is opened, the contents are
available, instead of feeding the body as in the case of her mother’s and grandmother’s cooking,
Bean Rolls nourishes the mind.
71

70
Michel de Certeau and Luce Giard, The Nourishing Arts. Food and Culture Reader, 2
nd
ed, ed., Carole
Counihan and Penny van Esterik, (New York: Routledge, 2008), 71.
71
Knowles expands on the stories about beans with A Bean Concordance (1980). Using the same format as
The Journal of the Identical Lunch, she invites others to share their stories, recipes and experiences about beans.
Continuing the collective thread that food is able to trace through a group.

34

Figure 8: Bottled Identical Lunch with Eggs, 1972
A manifestation of Identical Lunch appeared as a bottled-iteration in 1972 (fig. #8).
“Each of the above objects was prepared during the first week of October of ’72 and sealed one
month later, with the exception of #9 and #23. These two are bottled fresh at each
viewing….Each of the edition of twenty-three bottled lunches contains the above score, plus one
other ingredient.”
1
This lunch directly references Knowles’ childhood as she recalls the labor of
the women in her family. She was raised during the war years of WWII and rationing was a large
part of her upbringing. Her family kept a victory garden, and with it chickens, to which Knowles
gave names. Once the chickens were killed, they were processed and canned, and her mother
“had the unfortunate habit of labeling each one with the name of the chicken: we’re eating
‘Esmeralda’ tonight.”
72
At the same time, she remembers the fruits that were picked and
processed from her grandparents’ house in Pennsylvania. They would preserve peaches, pears,

72
Higgins, “Love's Labor's Lost and Found,” 11-12.

35

and plums in glass jars. This imagery directly translates into the Bean Rolls and the bottled
version of Identical Lunch. In this context, the use of jars or bottles signifies a woman’s labor.
Knowles collaborated with composer Anna Lockwood in 1974 to produce a publication
entitled “Womens Work,” that included scores created exclusively by women. Though it was
meant to be a magazine, only one issue was printed. Knowles asked Jean Brown, a supporter of
Fluxus, for funding. In a letter to Brown, Knowles wrote:
First of all the focus is not on women, but on new notations — but by women.
We believe that women are doing new work today and we want to give some of
that energy out. These will be complete scores for performance. We will request
work from all over the country. We are interested in what might be a thread of
similar sensibilities among creative women. Our choices will be based wholly on
the strength and quality of the work submitted and will not reflect any of the
partisanship within the women’s movement. The publication will be distributed
for free to people who will use it for performances- we are accepting notations
from all of the performance arts: dance, theater, music, multimedia and cooking!
73

In this excerpt, Knowles clearly gives cooking the same importance as performance arts.
There is no difference between the instructions given on an event score, or those on a recipe
card, they run parallel to one another. Each has an identical function: the written words notate the
performative instructions. The performer or cook can interpret the instructions however he or she
wishes, though deviating far from the instructions will lend to a completely different experience
or product.
Recipes passed down through the generations are usually done so orally, or with a quick
short-hand notation system. Historically, culinary instructions or measurements are rarely clearly
defined. Recipes from the Fannie Farmer Boston Cooking-School Cookbook (1896) are vague
and the instructions read like a Fluxus score.
74
Make a Salad is technically a recipe for a simple

73
Alison Knowles to Jean Brown, Jean Brown Papers, Box 28, Folder 36, The Getty Research Institute.
74
Fannie Merritt Farmer. The Original Boston Cooking-School Cook Book. (1896; repr., New York: The
New American Library, Inc., 1974), 255. “String Beans: Remove strings, and snap or cut in one-inch pieces; wash,

36

food staple. Identical Lunch gives specific instructions on how the sandwich should be
constructed, though it leaves the soup open to an endless amount of variations . The work itself is
nourishment, and by producing these scores, Knowles is feeding and sustaining performers.
The body that eats is classed and gendered, which is clearly the case with Knowles.
75
Knowles was a woman who not only raised twins, but also worked. As Knowles recalled, “Well,
I think that I finally could not carry on with paste-up and mechanicals and outside work. There
was simply either I hired someone or, and actually this Kitsy (Knowles’ mother in law), she did
send her helper, Lizzie Federman, for three days a week to take my twins to the park or just to
help me.” Since lunch is short, she went to a diner, one that boasted having “home-style
cooking.”
76
But at the same time, she would cook at home.
During the time that Make a Salad and Identical Lunch were first being performed,
Knowles’ female Fluxus contemporaries were also producing work that performed or elicited the
multi-sensory body. For example, Carolee Schneemann performed Meat Joy (1964), in which
nearly nude performers writhed on the floor and connected with raw fish, chicken, sausages, wet
paint and each other’s bodies. The performance was a combination of the polarizing capacity of
food and the body: erotic and sensual, and repellent and nauseating. Yoko Ono’s infamous 1964-
95 performances of Cut Piece presented the audience with the opportunity to come on stage and
cut any amount of Ono’s clothing off as she sat passively. As Kristine Stiles observed, “The
acute attention to multisensuality of Ono and other women artists associated with Fluxus ushers
viewer-participants into the personal territories of their own anatomy and focuses on the intimate

and cook in boiling water from one to three hours, adding salt last half-hour of cooking. Drain, season with butter
and salt.”
75
Stiles, “Tuna and Other Fishy Thoughts on Fluxus Events,” 27
76
Oral history interview with Alison Knowles, 2010 June 1-2, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution. Knowles states, “And I think it functioned very well with when we were living especially in Chelsea that
I could drive them to that children’s school on my bike and by the time I got home it was only 10:00 a.m. and I
could work until 4:00. So I didn’t have any trouble with motherhood. I got away so easy.”

37

sense of touch and smell.”
77
One of the reasons why Knowles is so often not included in the
writings of other women Fluxus artists is that the physical female body is absent in her work. She
deliberately controlled the way her body was presented.
78
Knowles wrote to Higgins, “I see
Lette, I see Yoko draped in crepe with face paint and I see myself going another way. I see my
sexuality receding into my personness. What will happen to me as I continue to do what I
consider useful work — my art.”
79
Knowles states how her sexuality is not a factor in her art-
making process. All of her work features an active body: if not her own, then that of the
participant. She did not foreground sensuality or sexuality in her own body, and she was not
interested in bringing nudity into her work. Instead, Knowles focused on a deep connection to
the everyday that grounds the body in its social relationships with itself and others, one that is
focused on regularity and consistency. The challenge in her work is not for a body to be
different, to question its station, but to be the same, and to explore subtlety within the confines of
routine. This connectivity continues in the recent iterations in of the two major food scores in
large-staged performances.

RECENT ITERATIONS OF IDENTICAL LUNCH AND MAKE A SALAD
Make a Salad was performed for the first time since the 1970s when it was included in an
exhibition entitled Work Ethic at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2003.
80
This initiated a

77
Kristine Stiles, “Between Water and Stone” in In the Spirit of Fluxus, ed Jane Jenkins (Minneapolis:
Walker Arts Center, 1993), 79.
78
For addition information see Kristine Stiles “Anomaly, Sky, Sex and Psi” in Critical Mass: Happenings,
Fluxus, Performance & Intermedia at Rutgers University 1958-1971. ed. Geoffrey Hendricks, (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 2003), 6.
79
Alison Knowles to Dick Higgins, September 16, 1974, Box 18, Folder 54, Dick Higgins Papers, The
Getty Research Institute.
80
Curated by Helen Molesworth

38

renewed interest in both Make a Salad and Identical Lunch.
81
By looking at a few of the recent
enactments at the Tate Modern, The Highline, Walker Art Center, the Museum of Modern Art
and several iterations of the exhibition Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art, a
comparison will be made with the earlier manifestations of the performances. Reception of the
works have changed since they were initially realized in the context of the relatively small
intimate spaces inside galleries and diners, compared to today’s much larger orchestrations in
more open and highly-accessible venues. Such a transformation of scale leaves the work
vulnerable to being experienced as a spectacle, instead of as an act emphasizing the masticating
and digesting body during communal interaction.
In 2008, Knowles performed Make a Salad (fig. #9) at the Tate in conjunction with USB:
Openings: The Long Weekend, a program designed to activate the permanent collection to
portrays fusions between art forms. In 2008, in particular, the programming coincided with an
exhibition entitled States of Flux.
82
Knowles worked with many other performers to cut and
prepare the ingredients on a bridge overlooking the audience. The ingredients of the salad were
thrown with gusto over the balcony and onto a tarp below as the audience cheered and gasped
with delight. This massive salad fed a total of 1900 people, and it was the first in a series of
enormous salads.

81
Hannah Higgins, e-mail message to author, March 3, 2015. “It is true that during those years she was
doing other pieces, specifically 'Shoemakers' Assistant,' the WDR radio pieces, 'Fishes of the Philippine Seas' and
the books. I don't recall Make a Salad being performed by her, but it was performed by others using the 'a la carte'
format which Ben Patterson invented. Pieces are ordered off a menu along with dinner and performed one-to-one at
tables. The format was used several times in 1992, at the Judson Church, the 'Excellent Festival' NikolaiKirke
(Copenhagen), Michael and Ute Berger's Fluxium church outside Wiesbaden (Germany), and the Arts Club
(Chicago, in 1993).” Identical Lunch also was not performed during this time period.
82
She also performed Shuffle and Newspaper Music.

39

Figure 9: Make a Salad at Tate Modern, 2008

In conjunction with Earth Day on April 22, 2012, Knowles performed Make a Salad at
the Highline, a public park built on an inactive elevated railroad track in New York City. The
ingredients for the salad included locally-sourced escarole, romaine, frisée, carrots, cucumbers,
onions, celery, and mushrooms for up to 1,000 people.
83
This enactment of the score was slightly
different than the others since it took place outside, in a public space, instead of in an exhibition
or concert setting. The day was dark and misty, and it took approximately two hours for the salad
ingredients to be chopped. During this time period, passersby were confused about what was
happening since the event was not framed within an art context. Knowles mentioned she was
“trying to seduce [a stranger] into this kind of work. Which is not easy. When a stranger says

83
High Line Art: presented by the friends of the High Line. Last modified March 31, 2015.
http://art.thehighline.org/project/alisonknowles/#sthash.WbnOodWn.dpuf.

40

‘What’s going on here? Making a salad out doors? In the rain? It must be an art event’”
84
The
piece is approached differently in a public space compared to an exhibition space. On a stage, an
audience member can expect some sort of display to take place. Removed not only from the
kitchen, but also from an art setting, the salad finds itself in a foreign context. It is the literal
consumption of the salad that pulls the participant back into an active role and into his or her
body. No matter how large the salad becomes, the intimate act of eating scales the performance
back to the body.
On July 10, 2014, along with her her son-in-law and collaborator Joshua Selman
Knowles performed Make a Salad as part of Open Field, a summer program that transforms the
Walker Art Center’s green lawn into a cultural commons.
85
According to the website, “While
each iteration of the piece is unique, the basic ingredients include Knowles preparing a massive
salad by chopping the ingredients to live music, tossing it in the air, then serving it to
the audience.”
86
These ‘basic ingredients,’ the added music and salad tossed in the air, were not
part of the performances in the 1960s. Knowles admits that the score has “had this evolution in
time.”
87
Instead of the audible sound of vegetables being chopped, this newest enactment of the
piece included an actual live music performance.
88
Make a Salad has gone through a major
evolutionary change: audiences reception has evolved from the time when the first performances
took place — just listening to the sounds of the chopping was not compelling enough to audience
members. The consumption of the salad has always had the same reaction: delicious and fresh.

84
High Line Art. “Alison Knowles Make a Salad performance at the High Line.” April 22, 2012,
http://art.thehighline.org/video/alisonknowles/
85
Laura Holway, “Artists Respond to Fluxus,” Walker Art Center Field Guide.
http://blogs.walkerart.org/ecp/2014/10/08/artists-respond-to-fluxus/
86
Walker Art Center. Open Field Artist-in-Residence. Part of Open Field 2014, Art Expanded, 1958-1978.
http://www.walkerart.org/calendar/2014/alison-knowles-make-a-salad.
87
Tate Shots, “Make a Salad,” September 3, 2008. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmqvnIXnmyM
88
Hannah Higgins, e-mail message to author, March 3, 2015. Higgins writes about Alison, “She's not clear
on how and why the musicians appeared, but she likes them.”

41

Though the salads have become larger and have crossed into the realm of the spectacle, the way
the salad’s preparation it has been performed is still in line with the early performances. The
sounds of the chopping are amplified, though now, the musical component is even more
emphasized through the addition of musicians.
Identical lunch, as it was conceived, was not to be performed in an institutional setting.
Galleries and exhibition spaces do not generally serve traditional tuna fish sandwiches like those
from the 1960s. The score first originated at Riss Foods, and when Knowles opened it up for
others to perform, they were able to so as long as they could find the score on a menu at a
restaurant. This disjunction between the original conceived site of the work and the function of a
gallery has been problematic in the recent iterations of the lunch in art institutions. This case also
points to the larger question of major institutions presenting past performances and pieces to
audiences within the construct of an exhibition or programming.
89

In 2011, Identical Lunch was performed in the café at MOMA in conjunction with the
exhibition Contemporary Art from the Collection. The exhibition occurred after MOMA
acquired the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection, which included Knowles’ Identical Lunch
silkscreens. MOMA invited Knowles to perform Identical Lunch in the adjacent café. When
asked about the importance of Fluxus performance, Knowles responded, “No question about it
and it’s not just my ideas of performance, but Fluxus has a room at MOMA. It also has all these
works on the fourth floor, which I don’t consider the Identical Lunch to necessarily be a Fluxus

89
Kristine Stiles, Tuna and Other Fishy Thoughts of Fluxus Events. 30. “Although these ‘items’ are
precisely the vehicles through which Fluxus values have penetrated more widely into social discourse, the
materialist fascination with the archival and museum Fluxus object threatens to deflect attention always from the
social and political import of the Fluxus performance.” Fluxus objects and performances were created in a manner to
avoid the elitism of the institution. A fundamental issue is made apparent when they are placed into the institutions
as precious art objects or performances re-perfromed to lead to an honest experience of these historical pieces. See
Amelia Jones, “The Now and the Has Been: Paradoxes of Live Art in History,” in Perform, Repeat, Record: Live
Art in History eds. Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield, (Chicago: Intellect, The University of Chicago Press,
2012).

42

work but I’m not a semanticist. Semantics don’t bother me that much. Just I think that the
Identical Lunch is basically a performance more than it’s the print works that I – that Silverman
kindly bought as sort of the residue.”
90
The lunch was orchestrated, with all of the meals coming
out of the kitchen at the same time. Due to the long, communal tables, conversation was difficult
with anyone beyond the people seated beside each other. There was no mayonnaise in the tuna at
all for this performance because the chef interpreted “no-mayo” to mean there should be no
mayonnaise in the tuna salad, when in fact it meant that it should not be spread on the bread.
Knowles accepts such variations as the maker’s interpretation of the score.
Identical Lunch is not just about consumption, it is about the individual performing the
score in solidarity with their surrounding environment and the cultural processes therein:
monetary transaction, conversation with server, and the ambient sounds of the room. The context
frames the taste experience. Kuipers argues that taste substances are meaningfully ordered in the
context of a “social visit.” He argues that the words for representing taste experience are best
understood not as mere tools for referring to discontinuous perception, but as multifunctional
signs that systematically fit into the social context of use.
91
The particular tastes the performer
experiences, are connected to the surroundings. The lunch punctuates a specific moment in time,
and the act of eating, fueling the body, roots the experience within a corporal experience.
In 2012 Knowles was included in an exhibition entitled, FEAST: Radical Hospitality of
Contemporary Art, which examined artists who use the table or communal eating as part of their
work. In its original location, at the Smart Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of
Chicago, a visitor could visit the museum café and order the Identical Lunch from the menu.
This mode of presenting the Identical Lunch is more akin to the original score. A participant

90
Oral history interview with Alison Knowles, 2010 June 1-2, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution.

43

could decide whether or not to stay strictly within the parameters of the score. The chance
operations that occurred in the busy café setting were more ordinary when mixed with the
preparation of other food smells, a well. In all iterations of the traveling versions of FEAST, the
1980 screenprints of Identical Lunch were on display, along with a copy of the Journal of the
Identical Lunch, a tuna fish sandwich and a cup of buttermilk which were placed on a pedestal
next to the didactic wall text. (fig. #16)

Figure 10: Installation shot from Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art

In Feast’s exhibition catalogue, there is an installation shot of two holograms hanging on
the wall along with a stool with a tuna fish sandwich and a cup of buttermilk perched on top of it
with the caption: “An earlier installation of the Identical Lunch (c. 1970s, exact location and date
unknown), the inspiration of Knowles’ adaptation for Feast.”
92
Though Knowles had displayed

91
Kuipers, “Matter of Tastes in Weyéwa,” 112.
92
Smith, ed. Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art, 66.

44

the sandwich in this manner, it was always alongside the participants consuming the score. In a
letter to Charlotte Moorman in regards to Identical Lunch being included in a festival, Knowles
writes:
I mounted a large performance of this piece at Univ. of San Diego this past year,
including Peter’s holograms of the sandwich eaten up in three stages, Josef’s tape
of the tuna factory in operation, Maciunas’ blended sandwich eaten on the spot,
and an iced display of live (just caught) tuna. What I do is feed people the lunch
as they look at and enjoy the other materials.
93

The visual materials do not conflict with the score, but when the sandwich was displayed
without the option of consuming it, as was the case when Feast traveled to SITE Santa Fe, the
participant was denied an integral aspect of the experience.
Though Knowles invites the participants to interpret the score, it is problematic when the
tuna sandwich is taken out of the context of the performance and objectified to fit into the visual
frame of a traditional exhibition. The point of the score is not to look at the sandwich, but to eat
it. As a reminder, the original score reads as follows:
A tuna fish sandwich on wheat toast with lettuce and butter, no mayo, and a large
glass of buttermilk or a cup of fresh soup was and is eaten many days of each
week at the same place at about the same time.

Buttermilk, however, is no longer a staple of any restaurant though it is still included in the
score. Part of the quaintness of performing the score today is being able to drink buttermilk.
Knowles wrote the repetition into the score because the oddity of eating the same thing everyday
for lunch was what brought this performance to the awareness of Corner. Once she extended the
score for others to perform, the aspect of repetition was expressed in the multitudes of
participants performing it, rather than in one person performing it over and over again. The score
was revised to reflect this change:

93
Alison Knowles to Charlotte Mormon, Mormon Collection #9, FJ3, Northwestern University.

45

A tuna fish sandwich on wheat toast with lettuce and butter, no mayo, and a large
glass of buttermilk or a cup of fresh soup.

For the participant to experience the score, the tuna sandwich needs to be consumed
through his or her body. Granted, for practical issues within the institution, it is not always
permissible to eat within a gallery setting. So the question becomes, if there is no adjacent café
willing offer the score as an option on the menu, is it acceptable to display the sandwich for the
audience to view it, as an alternative to eating it? Is an exclusively sight-based experience of the
score the same as a multi-sensory experience of it? No, it is not. Denying the viewer access to an
integral aspect of the piece actually removes the score from life and forces it into a sterile
exhibition experience. Viewing the objects produced from the performance, such as The Journal
of The Identical Lunch and the screen prints is not problematic since they document an
experience of the score. But to be shown the sandwich and not allow for its consumption
contradicts the purpose of the event score.
The sense of touch, a prominent aspect of Knowles’ practice, is a missing sense in these
institutional settings. When interacting with food, the hands become active in handling the object
as it travels to our mouths. In the case of the sandwich, much can be learned about its quality just
from the firmness of the bread. Constance Classen explores the history of touch in her book, The
Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch. She explains that in early museums, or cabinets of
curiosities, visitors were encouraged to touch the objects as part of the experience, “Visitors not
only touched objects in museums to verify their true nature, they touched them because they
wanted to experience them intimately. Sight requires distance to function properly, detaching the
observer from the observed. Touch, by contrast, annihilates distance and physically unites the
toucher and the touched.”
94
Strikingly, in the case of Knowles’ with Make a Salad and Identical

94
Constance Classen, The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch. (Urbana: University of

46

Lunch, the food being touched and consumed literally becomes part of the one touching it, down
to the molecular level after digestion.
The whimsical nature of recent iterations of Make a Salad continue in the recent
enactments of Identical Lunch. In 1971, George Maciunus’ suggested placing all of the
ingredients into a blender to produced a cold soup as his version of Identical Lunch.
95
For the
Feast exhibition in Chicago, Knowles performed The Symphony of the Identical Lunch, in which
participants were able to bring their own blender and Knowles “conducted” the buzz of the
motors.
The repeated versions of the works function as mediations on the original score. Though
each enactment is unlike the other, collectively they function as a sign of the everyday. The
scores are simple, and the simplistic nature relates to the Zen Buddhism on Knowles’ practice.
96

When a meditation is repeated over and over again, clarity is gained through the action. For
Knowles, there is no distinction between her spirituality and her art making. In a panel
discussion entitled “Art as Spiritual Practice” she described the difference between the
“tamashi,” the Japanese word for spirit, and “Jing Shen” the Chinese word for spirit. While
tamashi suggests that the spirit is inseparable from the material of the body, Jing Shen contrasts
the material of the body against the spiritual to create a duality. In both, there is always a tension
and an embrace between the material and the spiritual.

Illinois Press, 2012), 141.
95
In 1971 Maciunas wrote Knowles a letter: “Dear Alison, Here is my idea of the — Identical Lunch— Put
tuna fish, wheat toast, lettuce, butter, soup or buttermilk— all into a blender—blend til all is smooth—drink it. Best
regards, George.” This letter is archived in the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection.
96
As per Knowles, “That’s why Zen is mentioned in terms of Fluxus event performing. The action is
directed and precise with nothing added.”

47

According to Alison, “The ‘tama’ of ‘tamashi’ sounds the roundness of a ball, a sphere, a
stone, something precious and immediate to the senses.”
97
The tangibility of a multitude of
Knowles’ works speaks to this connectivity between body and spirit. Knowles continues,
“However, art-making is a spirit practice. The homeland body, our body, we breath into and we
take a pulse for the work.”
98
The importance of taking care of the participant’s body draws her
desire to include a spiritual approach to the work. Knowles’ work speaks to both the body and
the spirit. It is a means for the body to connect to the art object though consumption and for the
art object to provide nourishment to the spirit. In Make a Salad, several actions display the
ritualistic motions of domestic labor replicating a meditative state within the audience. By
watching the salad being prepared, as each vegetable is chopped, the arm and body repeats an
identical motion. The sounds of the chopping transforms the ritual into an auditory experience.
Though both the Identical Lunch and Make a Salad can be performed privately, they are
meant to be carried out in a group: nothing should be performed in solitude. With the salad, we
come together after an evening of viewing to mingle. Identical Lunch sets up to be able to be
performed in solitariness, and because of the multiple iterations of the score, and objects like The
Journal of the Identical Lunch Knowles has produced a massive network of connective tissue
that joins everyone who has performed it.

97
Alison Knowles, et al, “Art as Spiritual Practice,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Vol. 24, No.
3 (Sep., 2002), 20.
98
Ibid., 20.

48

CONCLUSION
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. Since all
feelings reside in the individual sensibility, I am interested in touching, awakening and
activating certain of my own and your own personal responses.
99

I personally experienced Identical Lunch in the home of Hannah Higgins in the suburbs
of Chicago after interacting with Fluxus objects and viewing the screenprints of Identical Lunch.
It was a casual meal with Hannah Higgins and Alison Knowles — the ingredients purchased on
the trip back from being picked up at the train station. Already, the dietary regulations of the 21
st

century were apparent, Higgins does not eat gluten, so her sandwich was made with gluten-free
bread. With no time to make soup, Higgins pulled a can of hearty minestrone from the cabinet.
When the soup came out of the can, I could not help but think of Lynn Lonidier’s entry in the
Journal of the Identical Lunch stating that her soup contained “a few vegetables hanging in it.”
100

Since Alison sat next to me as I ate my sandwich, I could not help but wonder how is this
experience differed from the early performances? How did it compare to recent iterations?
I do not have any recollection of what the tuna fish sandwich tasted like; it was neither
terrible, nor amazing. The soup, on the other hand had that awful layer of canned sodium that
coats the tongue, that tinge that lingers even after the dishes have been put away. But aspects of
the experience that I remember the most was the environment: sitting in a kitchen, the lush green
of early Chicago summer streaming through the large glass windows as we talked about beans,
salads and sandwiches: a continuation of a conversation that began long ago in a Chelsea diner.

99
Alison Knowles, excerpt from “Art, A Woman’s Sensibility,” a book published at Women’s House, CA
1975, p. 86. Dick Higgins Papers, Box 28, Folder 38, The Getty Research Institute. In the 1975 book, Art: A
Woman’s Sensibility, edited by Miriam Schapiro and connected to the CalArts Feminist Art Program.
100
Knowles, The Journal of the Identical Lunch, 2.

49

One of the main reasons why there have been so many enactments and interpretations of
both of Identical Lunch and Make a Salad is because the scores have been left open and Knowles
has intended that anyone could perform and modify the performance. Umberto Eco’s, The Open
Work, can be used to explain the audience experience with the open score. As Eco explains, the
work is finished by the viewer, “We have, seen that …‘open’ works, insofar as they are in
movement, are characterized by the invitation to make the work together with the author…”
101

There is an interactive process between the participant of the performance and the written score.
For instance, Make a Salad begins with the performers’ reading of the score and ends
with the making and eating of the salad — the work is incomplete without the audience
participation. The same condition is true with Identical Lunch — once the performer consumes
their lunch the event score has been performed. And multiple performers have been able to
shares their experience to a reading audience through the artist books and documentary art
objects. Knowles is the “composer” of the work, setting and conducting the parameters of the
performance. But the inherent openness that exists in most of her works, allows them to be
performed and experienced continuously. While I was speaking with Hannah Higgins and Alison
Knowles about the inclusive nature of the different iterations of her works, Higgins stated: “This
idea of iterations of the work: the House of Dust was the poem program by Jim Tenney but it
was also a place where students were doing meditations, where people were taking elements of
the instructions from computer generated instructions and doing things at the house and doing
things to the house. And I think this idea that other people step into Alison’s events is really
important in understanding how the pieces work.”
102

101
Umberto Eco. The Open Work. trans by Anna Cancogni (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989),
21.
102
Alison Knowles and Hannah Higgins in conversation with author, June 10, 2015.

50

Most importantly, these scores rely on senses beyond just vision to experience the work.
As Amelia Jones has argued about the multi-sensory aspect of live performance: “At the very
least, in terms of temporality and aesthetics, the live/performance art work thus activates the
spectatorial (and often auditory and tactile) relation to pose difficult questions.”
103
Not only are
the visual, auditory and tactile senses activated Make a Salad and Identical Lunch, but also the
olfactory and gustatory senses. Jim Drobnick writes “When inhaling aromas and ingesting foods,
audiences become aware of their own bodies and their relation in space. The actions of breathing
in and swallowing collapses rigid dichotomies of viewer and object, self and other, and even
inside and outside.”
104
It is critical that the body is activated through the taste and smell of the
score. Drobnick continues, “The practice of engaging an audience’s sense of smell and taste
invariably brings to the fore complex (and conflicting) attitudes toward the body, identity and
cultural affiliation.” The olfactory senses are most connected to memory “The emotional and
memory-based associations of the smell arise from direct contract with matter itself—not from
its representation or reproduction.”
105
Smell connects a person to a primary source, such as a
tuna sandwich or salad, that offers a level of experience that is fundamentally different than
viewing that same source without the virtue of scent. At the same time, the olfactory sense is
able to connect to specific memories to specific smells of the vegetables, the acidity of the
dressing, the fishiness of the tuna, etc. Performing the score in future meals that contain the
same ingredients will evoke those olfactory elements and the memories associated with them.

103
Amelia Jones, “The Now and the Has Been: Paradoxes of Live Art in History,” in Perform, Repeat,
Record: Live Art in History, eds. Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield, (Chicago: Intellect, The University of
Chicago Press, 2012), 15.
104
Jim Drobnick, “Recipes for the Cube: Aromatic and Edible Practices in Contemporary Art,” in Fisher,
Barbara, ed. Foodculture: Tasting Identities and Geographies in Art, (Toronto: YYZ Books, 1999). 76
105
Higgins, The Fluxus Experience, 45.

51

Knowles provoked the performer of her event scores to be aware of his or her body.
Knowles’ performance of BLIND LUNCH, a variation on Identical Lunch in 1975 at Gentle
Surprises: An evening with Alison Knowles and Bill Fontana at Traegarden, Denmark . The
pamphlet for that performance read, “Since all things reside in the individual sensibility, we are
interested in touching, wakening and activating your personal responses. Much of this will
happen through sound using street objects as musical instruments, much through events created
from daily occurrences such as eating a sandwich or peeling an apple.”
106
Sight was removed
from the experience and touch, smell, taste and sound were emphasized during the meal. As a
result, the intricacies that are sometimes overlooked among these senses became heightened.
Make a Salad is complete as long as one makes a salad. It could be a salad of wild greens
or one with store bought lettuce. There could be radishes, or not. What is crucial is that the
participant to finish the score and complete the total sensory experience. And long as one eats a
tuna fish sandwich on wheat toast with lettuce and butter, no mayo, and has a large glass of
buttermilk or a cup of fresh soup, then one has performed the Identical Lunch. Knowles writes:
“There are hundreds of performances of this score daily in New York City alone, that I don’t
know about. There have been hundreds that I do know about, many of which have been
documented by myself and invited participants and published by Nova Broadcast Press in San
Francisco.”
107
Everyone who has eaten the tuna fish sandwich has performed the score, and is
connected to everyone who will perform the score.
Knowles’ work encompasses major tenets of Fluxus. Her work is humorous, edging on a
tongue-in-cheek manner as she asks the performer to eat a sandwich with either a cup of
buttermilk or soup as art. Her work is anti-commodity and democratic. By using objects from

106
Pamphlet for Gentle Surprises, Box 28, Folder 37, Jean Brown Papers, The Getty Research Institute.
107
Ibid.

52

around her life that are easily accessible to all, she opens the experience to a large audience. The
scores are written; the performer interacts with the words to enact the event score. Make a Salad
and Identical Lunch are ephemeral; by being eaten, they disappear from the visual but become
part of the body of the participant. The multi-sensory experience grounds the experience for the
participant: Identical Lunch and Make a Salad present an opportunity to see, hear, touch, smell,
and taste these event scores, which create experiences that revolve around the full realm of the
senses and the consuming body. The performers activate the event scores, and in turn, the scores
activate every sense in the performer’s body. To deny the experience of even a single sense,
denies the connectivity to the everyday: multi-sensory bodies maneuver through the world and
multi-sensory bodies connect life to art.

53

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anteater Antics: Odds and ends from Special Collections and Archives, UC Irvine Libraries Last
modified, March 15, 2015.
https://ucisca.wordpress.com/2010/07/20/marcel-duchamp-festival-1971/.

Burskirk, Martha, Amelia Jones and Caroline A. Jones, “The Year in “Re-” Artforum.com,
December 2013. https://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201310&id=44068

Classen, Constance. The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2012.

Clearwater, Bonnie. West Coast Duchamp. Miami Beach: Grassfield Press, 1991.

Corner, Philip. The Identical Lunch. Barton: Nova Broadcast Press, 1973.

Counihan, Carole and Penny van Esterik, ed. Food and Culture Reader, 2
nd
ed. New York:
Routledge, 2008.

Dewey, John. Art as Experience. 1934. Reprint, New York: Penguin Group, 2005.

Drobnick, Jim, ed. The Smell Culture Reader. New York: Berg, 2006.

Eco, Umberto. The Open Work. Translated by Anna Cancogni. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1989

Farmer, Fannie Merritt. The Original Boston Cooking-School Cook Book. 1896. Reprint, New
York: The New American Library, Inc., 1974.

Fisher, Barbara, ed. Foodculture: Tasting Identities and Geographies in Art. Toronto: YYZ
Books, 1999.

Formis, Barbara. “Eating as an Aesthetic Experience.” In Practicing Pragmatist Aesthetics:
Critical Perspectives on the Arts. Edited by Wojciech Małecki, 169-183. Rodopi:
Amsterdam/New York, 2014.

Friedman, Ken, ed. The Fluxus Reader. New York: Academy Editions, 1988.

Gray, John. Action Art: A Bibliography of Artists’ Performance from Futurism to Fluxus
and Beyond. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1993.

Hendricks, Geoffrey, ed. Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Performance, Intermedia, and
Rutgers University 1958-1972. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003.

High Line Art: presented by the friends of the High Line. Last modified March 31, 2015.

54

http://art.thehighline.org/project/alisonknowles/#sthash.WbnOodWn.dpuf.

High Line Art. “Alison Knowles Make a Salad performance at the High Line.” April 22,
2012. http://art.thehighline.org/video/alisonknowles/

Higgins, Hannah. The Fluxus Experience. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2002.

------. “Love's Labor's Lost and Found: A Meditation on Fluxus, Family, and Somethings
Else” Art Journal, Vol. 69, No. 1/2 (2010): 8-22.

Higgins, Dick. “Statement on Intermedia.” In Dé-coll/age (décollage) * 6. Edited by Wolf
Vostell. (Typos Verlag: Frankfurt New York: Something Else Press), 1967.

------. “Intermedia.” Leonardo, Vol. 32, no 1 (2001), 49-54.

Holway, Laura. “Artists Respond to Fluxus.” Walker Art Center Field Guide.
http://blogs.walkerart.org/ecp/2014/10/08/artists-respond-to-fluxus/
Hansen, Al. A Primer of Happenings & Time/Space Art. New York: Something Else Press, Inc.,
1965.

Hendricks, Geoffrey. Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Performance & Intermedia at Rutgers
University 1958-1971. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003.

Howes, David, ed. Empire of the Senses New York: Berg, 2005.

------. The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the
Anthropology of the Senses Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.

Jenkins, Janet ed. In the Spirit of Fluxus. Minneapolis: Walker Arts Center, 1993.

Jones, Amelia, and Adrian Heathfield, eds. Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History.
Chicago: Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Knowles, Alison. A Bean Concordance. Barrytown, N.Y.: Printed Editions, 1983.
------. Bean rolls. New York : Fluxus, 1963.
------. Footnotes: Collage Journal 30 Years. New York City: Granary Books, 2000.
------. Journal of the Identical Lunch. San Francisco: Nova Broadcast Press, 1971.
------. By Alison Knowles. New York: Something Else Press, 1965.

------. Indigo Island: Art works by Alison Knowles. Dillingen: Stadtgalerie Saabücken, 1995.

55

Knowles, Alison, Eleanor Heartney, Meredith Monk, Linda Montano, Erik Ehn and Bonnie
Marranca “Art as Spiritual Practice” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Vol. 24,
No. 3 (Sep., 2002), pp. 18-34

Lewallen, Constance, and Karen Moss, eds. State of mind: New California Art circa
1970. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California, Berkeley Art
Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Orange Country Museum, University of California
Press, 2011.

Molesworth, Helen, ed. Work Ethic. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press,
2003.

Morais, Betsy. “Salad As Performance Art,” The New Yorker, April 26, 2012,
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/salad-as-performance-art

Novero, Cecilia. Antidiets of the avant-garde: from Futurist Cooking to Eat Art
University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

O’Dell, Kathy “Fluxus Feminus” TDR Vol. 41, No. 1 (Spring, 1997): 43-60.

Oral history interview with Alison Knowles, 2010 June 1-2, Archives of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution

Robinson, Julia. “The Sculpture of Indeterminacy: Alison Knowles's Beans and Variations” Art
Journal; Winter (2004): 97-115.

Smith, Andrew S. American Tuna: The Rise and Fall of an Improbable Food. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2012.

Smith, Stephanie, ed. Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art. Chicago: Smart
Museum of Art, University of Chicago, 2013.

Something Else Press Yearbook ,1974. Something Else Press, Inc Barrytown, 1973

Tate Shots. “Make a Salad.” September 3, 2008.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmqvnIXnmyM.

Walker Art Center. Open Field Artist-in-Residence. Part of Open Field 2014, Art Expanded,
1958-1978. http://www.walkerart.org/calendar/2014/alison-knowles-make-a-salad.

Weiss, Allen S., ed Taste Nostalgia. New York: Lusitania Press, 1997.

Woods, Nicole L. “Taste Economies: Alison Knowles, Gordon Matta-Clark and the intersection
of food, time and performance. Performance Research: A journal of the Performing Arts,
19:3 (2014): 157-161.

56

Yoshimoto, Midori, and Alex Pittman ed. “An Evening with Fluxus Women: A Roundtable
Discussion” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory Vol. 19, No. 3 (2009):
369-389.

Zanichelli, Elena; Palazzo Magnani. Women in Fluxus & Other Experimental Tales :
Eventi Partiture Performance: A Cura di Elena Zanichelli Milano: Skira, 2012.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Alison Knowles (b. 1933), an artist associated with Fluxus since its inception in the early 1960s, makes work that incorporates diurnal rhythms, performance, and bodily consumption with a keen attention to the everyday. Using ordinary items such as sandwiches and salads, Knowles was one of the first artists to incorporate the communal act of food consumption into her work while embodying fundamental aspects of Fluxus practice: using open event scores to activate objects and perform inclusive intermedia events. ❧ This thesis traces Knowles’ practice primarily through Proposition #1, Make a Salad (1962) and Identical Lunch (1967), scores that have been performed numerous times throughout her career and which have served as an essential interface with the public through the medium of the meal. Since these event scores have remained open, Knowles has been able to continuously enact these works, although the social implications of the objects and audience reception have shifted during the decades following primary conception. Rather than relying solely on visual presentation, these works are consumed by the participants, thereby offering an activated experience of all the senses, including the olfactory and gustatory systems. The thesis culminates with recent enactments of these scores within institutional programming that insert problematic situations when a truly multi-sensory experience is denied.

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Performance into pedagogy: Anna Halprin, Allan Kaprow, and Alison Knowles' score-based events in experimental arts education

PDF

The plausible, ongoing, and disappearing acts of James Lee Byars: early performance works (1955-1967)

PDF

From land art to social practice: environmental art projects by Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, Bonnie Ora Sherk, Mel Chin, Fritz Haeg, and Fallen Fruit

PDF

Acting out dissent; imaginary lives the performance strategies of My barbarian’s Post-Living Ante-Action Theater

PDF

The art of staying: Theaster Gates and the Rebuild Foundation

PDF

Explorer-at-large: artist-led inquiry and the rise of the museum as athenaeum

PDF

Teaching freedom: the power of autonomous temporary institutions and informal pedagogy in the work of Tania Bruguera and Suzanne Lacy

PDF

Territories of resistance: the impact of the Zapatista Rebellion on artistic practices in Mexico City, 1994-1995

PDF

Performative futurity: transmuting the canon through the work of Rafa Esparza

PDF

Performing excess: the politics of identity in La Chica Boom

PDF

Contingent practice: contemporary methods in art process dependent on architecture of the exhibition space

PDF

The constellations of Holocaust representation: performative monuments, museums, and survivors’ artworks

PDF

Animating the periphery: Studio of the Streets and the politicization of the Buffalo community through public access television and media literacy

PDF

Nude performances in the practice of Fiona Banner, 2006-2010

PDF

Museum programming and the educational turn

PDF

Up to code: geopolitics and its influence on cultural production on the Internet

PDF

Ableism in the U.S. art context: curators, art museums, and the non-normative body

PDF

ALT LA: alternative art spaces that shaped Los Angeles, 1964-1978

PDF

Sustainability through participation: public art projects by Fritz Haeg, Futurefarmers, and Fallen Fruit

PDF

What’s the wig deal?: Exploring the use of wigs and head accessories in queer performance