Alison Knowles

As I recall, Knowles is the one who suggested to Higgins (weren't they married?) that he call his press "Something Else" or, rather, he sd something like: "Maybe I shd call the press [fill in the blank]?" & AK replied: "No, call it something else" - in other words, she may not've intended "something else" to be a proper noun but Higgins may've turned it into that.

Anyway, I suppose I can honestly say that I'm both intriqued by Knowles' work & bored by it. In some of the works I'm familiar w/ she tends to be very low-key in just focusing on things like beans or shoes - wch is fine & marvelous & very Zen or very Fluxus or whatever but since I'm not necessarily that interested in beans or shoes it doesn't do that much for me. STILL, I like very much that she does what she does - it's so UNSENSATIONAL: she does what she does b/c it interests HER. Just as it 'shd' be.

This pamphlet collects together simple prose performance instructions wch I can easily imagine being handwritten or typed on index cards - classic Fluxus style. Here's an example:

"#5 -

Street Piece (October, 1962 to March, 1963)

Make something in the street and give it away."

I've done things like this & so've other people I know & there's a sort of openness to it that I find enjoyable. Ever on the alert for the sociopathic, though, I can also imagine harmful or malicious versions of this too - but it's the kind & gentle ones that I like & am attracted to. Knowles is CONTEMPLATIVE & seeing this pamphlet makes me interested in her all over again.

When I just did a GoodReads search for her I noticed that she, too, has a bk called "Footnotes" - published in 2000. That's a nice surprise. When I named my 10th bk "footnotes" I knew I was picking a generic name that my use of wd tweak quite a bit. I reckon Knowles has done the same.

It's somewhat remarkable to me that even though Knowles' work is perhaps focused on things of little interest to many people that she is widely published. I even have a CD of hers. So there must be a wider interest in what interests her & what she does w/ it than I might initially imagine. That makes me feel like all isn't just endless war - as it so often seems to be.

… (mehr)

This ISN"T a Great Bear Pamphlet & it ISN"T published by Something Else Press. It DOES have the same cover design as a GBP (the same outline, same font) but there's no bear. It's obviously a sequel of sorts to "by Alison Knowles" but this is on the successor press to Something Else: Printed Editions. & this is the 2nd edition - wch is, indeed, different from the 1st edition. Her intro:

"These pieces in MORE are the writings, spoken parts, poems and events from my environments of the 1970's. Given the opportunity to reprint MORE, I decided to leave out several of the shorter pieces in the first edition to make room for Three New Bean Events, The Shoemaker's Assistant, and Bean see also Bien. The collage preface that follows was made by Philip Corner."

This is bigger & has more variety than the 1st "by Alison Knowles". It includes a poem for George Maciunas taken from the New York City phone Book in 1965. Here's an excerpt:

Bean Adeliade 876 6636
Bean B H 850 3842
Bean Bag Day Care Center 749 5030
Bean, Barret and May Sales and Service BA9 0494

A bit off the subject of Knowles here is that I saw Steve McCaffery perform a reading from a phone bk at SUNY Buffalo in 1995 & it was one of the most convincingly passionate & dramatic readings I've ever witnessed.… (mehr)

"GEM DUCK - a heavy duck fabric cemented to insoles to support and strengthen the insole lip." I've already commented on Knowles elsewhere in these reviews. She makes work centered around things that probably very few other people have much of an interest in - distinctly unsensational material - &, yet. here's an Italian bi-lingual edition of collages of decayed photocopies of shoes & shoe parts shoe-relevant text such as "a letter from Geoff Hendricks containing a dream of shoes". This wd've been a fairly early use of the decay possibilities of multiple generation photocopies [not as early as Ian Burn's ""Xerox" Book, 1968, that explores that aspect specifically] & the work's general grayness reflects this.

Knowles wrote: "Getting this together was like sorting stones and putting them into dishes underwater." That description alone is endearing & expressive of what I presume to be the general attitude behind the work: accumulate material that appeals to you personally & organize it intuitively & aesthetically. For me? It doesn't do anything except maybe make me imagine doing the same sort of thing for myself - imagining the underwater rocks is appealing - but more as a way to spend a casual spontaneous summer afternoon w/ a friend than something worth killing trees for to make a bk out of. But I can appreciate Knowles' sense of priorities being completely different from my own & like her just for that.… (mehr)