
Wood and metal frame with silkscreen, digital print on silk, collage, assemblage, personal ephemera, beans, books, fishing net, photographs, ship anchor, fabric tunnel, electrical lights, audio recording, etc.,
Courtesy the artist and James Fuentes Gallery, New York
Photo: Bryan Conley, Carnegie Museum of Art
Alison Knowles
Forum Gallery
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh [link]
May 20-October 24, 2016
The Carnegie’s gallery is exactly as Dick Higgins described Knowles’s Big Book decades ago: as an “anthology,” an “accumulation” about situation and experience. Her survey, like this life-size, live-in publication and its ancestor, The Boat Book, cannot be described in any other way, except to borrow another of Higgins’s terms: intermedia. Objects spanning Knowles’s earliest Fluxus activities until now both excite and calm, puzzle and amaze, and ignite the senses. Sounds of beans shuffled by feet and the artist’s gentle voice float throughout, drawing in adults and children alike to experience excerpts of Knowles’s life, inseparable from her art.
Lauren Fulton
images courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Art and Lauren Fulton




