works that incorporate performance art, installations, sound art, and bookmaking make up knowles’s oeuvre
KNOWLES CONDUCTS HER
KRIS SNIBBE/HARVARD UNIVERSITY NEWS OFFICE
performance piece Newspaper Music, a simultaneous reading, at the Radcliffe Institute on October 19, 2009.
JESSICA HIGGINS, WHO
REBECCA MIGDAL
is Knowles’s daughter, participates in Loose Pages. In this piece, her mother dresses her in leaves of flax paper.
admitted to a preoccupation with beans: “I study them, and I use them in my art, and I eat them, like everybody else.”) But Fluxus dealt with more than found objects. It sought to blur the distinction between artist and audience. Event scores made performance art out of simple actions, like her 1962 Make a Salad. Her 1967 collaboration with Marcel Duchamp, the silk-screen print Coeurs Volants, proved that more traditional media were also game. Poetry, too, served as fodder for Fluxus: Knowles’s “The House of Dust,” perhaps the world’s first computerized poem, earned her a 1968 Guggenheim Fellowship.
After the history lesson, the lights dimmed, and five women joined Knowles onstage to perform event scores. In Newspaper Music, they pulled out rustling papers, reading aloud in several languages as Knowles conducted. When she signaled a decrescendo, the multilingual tumult turned into the low murmur of a coffee shop before dwindling to whispers. Then Jessica Higgins, an intermedia artist and Knowles’s daughter, stepped forward for Loose Pages. Higgins became a living sculpture for Knowles, who dressed her in leaves of flaxen paper. As Knowles added pages to
her legs, Higgins curled around her mother’s body for support. After the performance, an audience member asked Knowles if she found special meaning in performing with Higgins. Yes, Knowles replied, “I like the concept that I can’t find the right dress for her . . . because it’s got to be perfect for Jessica.” The questioner? Susan Phelps Napier, daughter of Julia S. Phelps, the art historian and teacher for whom this Radcliffe Institute lecture series was named. ƒ Kristin Waller ’05 is the assistant Web editor at the Radcliffe Institute. Winter 2010 r a d c l i f f e m a g azine
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