Alison Knowles Made Art That Was Designed To Delight And Disappear

The artist in the video is elfin, mischievous. Even at nearly 80, she is taller than many of the assistants who join her chopping lettuce at a long counter. Her index finger is bandaged, perhaps from an earlier chopping incident. In the video it is a cold, wet day in 2012 on New York City’s High Line, and Alison Knowles cheerfully narrates the question she assumes passers-by are posing as they walk past this remounting of her most famous work. “You’re making a salad outdoors and in the rain?” she asks. Then she answers: “This must be an art event!” That a theoretical passer-by might reasonably leap to that conclusion—that a half-dozen cooks preparing a tarp-sized salad in a public park is an “art event”—is in no small part thanks to Knowles, who in her six decade-plus career did as much as anyone to expand the boundaries of artistic work. Likely no retrospective could fully capture her capacious artistic practice, but “by Alison Knowles,” a retrospective show open at the Grey Art Museum at New York University, serves as an invigorating introduction to a creative force whose questing imagination seems, a year after her death at 92, both sui generis and like a blueprint for the future. Alison Knowles was born in 1933 in Scarsdale, New York. She studied painting at the Pratt Institute, where her father was an administrator, and was on her way to being, in her words, “the next Helen Frankenthaler” when she took a summer course with Josef Albers at Syracuse. Exiled to the basement of the building because of her refusal to follow Albers’ strict instructions, Knowles vowed to stop pursuing “the traditional methods of artmaking,” as she later told an interviewer. One of her early paintings, “Taxis and Busses” (1959-60), hangs near the entrance to the retrospective; it’s a lively mix of oil-painted circus designs and screen-printed commercial logos. It’s one of only two early Knowles paintings that survive; she burned all the others on the beach just a few years later.

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