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Deborah Kass Black and Blue, 2015 Oil, acrylic and neon on canvas 60 × 60 in 152.4 × 152.4 cm.

Whenever I hang around with Alison Knowles, my “Oma,” I feel like I’m in some kind of Flux-Labyrinth. It’s a very familiar mood at this point, since she lives surrounded by her work and surrounded by lots of books and media by and about vintage Fluxus artists. We start by talking about everyday life and we usually end up at her work in art and Fluxus. My main interest this weekend was to be with Alison to see her get an award, but I knew there would be lots of surprises. She gets awards, interviewed, commissioned and celebrated every other week. There are always at least three things going on at the same time when we’re together.

I’ve decided to write this photo essay in the spirit of Alison’s world by running three threads together in my article for Artist Organized Art. I am contributing a photo essay, where most of my thoughts are in the photos and captions, which run through an interview with Alison. I invited Alison to include an interview she was working on with Joshua Selman. The theme of the interview is her work with art environments. I like the idea of my photo essay moving through it like a person through a space. I also enter into the interview at the end to answer a couple of questions. Last, but not least, is a video at the bottom of this article where I go through the Flux-Labyrinth with Alison. In that video I’ve also included some still pictures shared by Mark Bloch, but I’ve processed them into my little video labyrinth. The piece is silent until the last few minutes and then there’s plenty of sound.

At the end of April, Alison received the Francis Greenburger Award. I heard it was a great event at the New Museum, but I couldn’t go. I’m in 9th grade.. too much school work. Two weeks later Pratt Institute awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Art to Alison. Since I’m also interested in Brooklyn and Pratt Institute, I went along to the ceremony at Madison Square Garden with the idea of celebrating Alison’s award and meeting a few people who run that great institution. Shepard Fairey, Alison Knowles, James Turrell, Karen Brooks Hopkins and Holland Cotter received Honorary Doctorates and it was great to hear them speak. I’m probably working on this article because of something each one of them had to say.

It was a very exciting day with Pratt Institute, but by midnight we were very tired and had to turn in. The next day I went with Alison to the Frieze Art Fair to see her dealer, James Fuentes, at his space and to enjoy the art fair. Frieze was good enough to grant an official press pass, since I agreed to come up with something for Artist Organized Art. We also wanted to see a re-creation of the George Maciunas Flux-Labyrinth. Cecilia Alemani is the curator behind the re-creation. I first met her when I was part of the Make A Salad performance at The High Line, which I really liked. I thought I might see her at Frieze, but instead I met many other old and new friends.

For this article I’ve invited an interview with Alison, led by Joshua Selman, about environments and art fairs (my photo essay continues in captions):

Joshua Selman: Do you see a relationship between The Boat Book as an environment and the Flux Labyrinth as an environment, in the context of an art fair devoted to visual art?

Alison Knowles: I began to be disinterested in painting after a few shows and became much more engaged with what were called actions. Dick’s Press would publish small books about performance art and I liked that we engaged by performing with and playing for people, asking them to do unusual things to think of as art such as being in art not simply standing in front of a picture and looking at it, but getting down on all fours and going through a tunnel and up a ladder.

So putting the whole person in was the idea. The Big Book was the first walk through environment that I made. We could turn the pages and close ourselves off in a little room, or again it had tunnels and ladders. It’s the same direction for the viewer to be in the work. So there was the Big Book, The Book of Bean and recently at Art Basel, Miami, the Boat Book, here at Frieze we see the Flux-Labyrinth standing out from much of the fair.

JS: What do you think of the Flux-Labyrinth as an environmental form containing a group show? By contrast to today’s thematic group exhibits, it’s refreshing to see artists engage through parallel play.

AK: To me it all signals a move away from Museum paintings. The work we did in Fluxus as performers helped to do that. I think it’s a good thing, because, in my view being an artist, or being in art, is a very positive experience in this world and in life. It doesn’t require any special training in my book, but it does involve commitment and an ability to engage the work with people.

JS: I usually find environmental works associated with a single artist, it’s rare that a group of artists each work on a component of an architecturally unified outcome.

AK: It shows a direction away from painting and into action and engagement. We had George Maciunas directing what locations we were each working with. He knew in advance what we were going to do and I think we accepted his leadership. For Frieze, I had nothing to do with designing the labyrinth itself or with the bean garden in it. I would have done some things differently, but I know what these people are faced with economically and especially in terms of time. I go with, I go with, I go with and it’s very different from the concept of being a printer, or painting, where you’re in charge of the whole deal. I enjoy going with interaction.

JS: In terms of scale, the Boat Book debuted at Art Basel in Miami last December at a scale equivalent to the Big Book and the Book of Bean. The Bean Garden for the Flux Labyrinth is a bit smaller, but fits into an extensive structure. How do you compare the projects?

AK: I enjoy putting people into an artwork. So, I very much go with the director who’s got to do all that negotiation and spatial organization and I accept.

JS: When you go to an environment like the Venice Biennale, that is already an environment for people to go through, how do you feel about inserting your own environment? Especially at the Biennale, imagine taking your passion for putting people through an artwork and they are already in one, how do you resolve that?

AK: We’ll see! We’ll see how it goes..

JS: Ah, so if you get a chance to do an environment in Venice, we will have to attend the Biennale to find out the answer to my question. Very nice, I’m buying my ticket.

AK: I arrive, put my foot in and do the best I can with it. It usually works out well enough, even for me.

JS: Would you need to go to Venice ahead of time to actually decide how you want to grapple with the issue of inserting an environment?

AK: The decisions, a lot of them, have already been made when I arrive at a biennale, by very good people, curators who have given me a space. My disposition is to work with the people who have done the hard work of getting me there, paying my ticket, housing me and giving me the prize money. I do enjoy being in the work, physically sitting in it, then people have a chance to talk with me a little as they come through a tunnel, over a ladder, look through a porthole and move through the rooms.

JS: How do you see the Boat Book and the Big Book in relation to the House of Dust beyond the computerized poem, but as the environment described by the poem, fully realized for people to move through?

AK: Well the House of Dust was realized in honor of James Tenney who programmed and ran the miles long output of the House of Dust poem onto continuous dot matrix printer paper using a FORTRAN routine. The House of Dust is possibly the first computer generated poem and it goes on and on describing where people live, what each house is made of, the type of light it’s in and who the inhabitants are. At Cal Arts we built one iteration. I was there teaching for a few years and took people through it, stayed overnight sometimes. In California it had a beehive shape. I think these kind of installations test the premise that visual art hangs on a wall simply to be viewed. We do honor the great American painters, but most of my students are into activities and actions rather than still work.

JS: That’s very interesting. I want to ask a last question about triangulating food, shelter and clothing in art-making.

AK: Of the food pieces, I’ve done Make a Salad, or Make a Soup, for large audiences. The clothing would be Shoes of Your Choice, that’s a big favorite. We made a lot of t-shirt artworks, t-shirts with art on them.

JS: You also made works on bedding and drapes, etc.

AK: Right! The whole housing thing..

JS: The clothing is where fiber takes off in your work isn’t it?

AK: Because I could print on it. I was trained as a printmaker and could make a silk screen of any size and print B-E-D on the bedding, or I could print it with a spoken text.

JS: By wearing, do each of us become part of a performance?

AK: It’s true! Off the wall, off the canvas.

JS: So you place people in an environment, move them through the environment, they wear the environment and you’re feeding them, as a major work. I wouldn’t mind being part of something like that in Venice. Please keep me on the short list, if and when.

AK: I remember at the Tate Modern, Make a Salad was very dramatic. We threw the greens over a balcony and four or five people tossed it with dressing in a tarp positioned beneath. Some artists have criticized this as art made from women’s work, but woman’s work was never considered performance worthy. When I make a salad for hundreds of people I also have men up there chopping. Because, I know many who do a lot of work in the kitchen. A lot of women go to the office. All the rolls are upside down today.

JS: Food, shelter and clothing are basic to community.

AK: That’s right.

JS: “Women’s work” does that imply women are the basis of a community?

AK: Not so, not so. The House of Dust was an existing shelter in California. Earthway finally took it away, split it in half and the half that was left was put in a children’s park. It was about the size of that closet. You could go into it and crawl around. So an impermanent outdoor sculpture is transformed for play. It was great for little kids.

JS: Why are you doing so many environmental works recently?

AK: Well, I do what I’m invited to do. I’m not invited to make paintings. I’m invited to do Fluxus actions, or performances of my own, or more recently to build environmentally scaled works. Art changes around artists as they carry it along.

JS: Alison, thank you for your time and thoughts. Clara Joy, thank you for agreeing to photo journalize at Frieze for Artist Organized Art. As an Instagrammer with many thousands of followers you display your art works in public, globally, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and you’ve built your audience yourself from the ground up. How do you feel about the limited exposure an art fair such as Frieze provides to galleries and artists. One gallerist told me he paid $22,000.00 for a 100 square foot enclosure that lasts for 4 days. I’m not sure what if anything was sold, though I did like the display.

Clara Joy: It’s different because I post photography on Instagram and it has to do with the culture of Instagram. Frieze artists don’t really have to do directly with Instagram culture. They are trying to sell and promote their work in a different way. Work they’re showing at Frieze, and I think Frieze is great, but.. it is a lot of money for something that’s only for a very short time.

JS: You are photographing the work of other artists at the Frieze NY Art Fair. As a Teenage Instagram Photographer, do you see what you are producing as objective, or do you prefer to make new work out of the works you’re photographing? How does that work with you audiences?

CJ: It’s generally their art work, but it does have a sense of someone’s work or someone’s art when it’s posted.. like a photo of a photo at a museum. The way we take it can be our own work. If we take a photo of a painting at Frieze it is our art work, because we’re taking it in a way that’s different than the painting on the wall, but the work inside the photo is the original artist’s art work.

Alison Knowles (born 1933) in New York City is an American visual artist known for her soundworks, installations, performances, and publications. Knowles was very active in the Fluxus movement, and continues to create work inspired by her Fluxus experience. In the early 1960s, published by Something Else Press, Knowles composed the Notations book of experimental composition with John Cage and Coeurs Volants a print with Marcel Duchamp. She also traveled and performed throughout Europe, Asia and North America. In 1963, Knowles produced one of the earliest book objects, a can of texts and beans called the Bean Rolls. In 1967, Knowles and James Tenney produced the computer generated poem The House of Dust. A sound installation for a House of Dust public sculpture was produced by Max Neuhaus. The 1983 book Loose Pages, originally produced in collaboration with Coco Gordon, consisted of pages made for each part of the body. She is represented by James Fuentes Gallery, New York and recently appeared at Frieze NY Art Fair 2014/15. Since 1964, Knowles has made large and small experimental books: The Bean Rolls (1964) was a hand held, canned book of small scrolls of bean lore and information which has appeared in important artists’ books surveys alongside titles such as By Alison Knowles and More by Alison Knowles (1965/1979), Spoken Text (1993), Bread and Water and Indigo Island (both 1995). Passenger Books recently published a new collection of essays, transcribed interviews and articles and reviews related to The Big Book (1967), a walk-in book construction with 8-ft. tall pages, moving around a center spine. Knowles has continued her examination of books at various scales, from The Book of Bean (1983) to The Finger Book of Ancient Language, a table top book in Braille and other tactile languages (1987). The Boat Book (2014), commissioned by James Fuentes Gallery, appeared at Art Basel, Miami Beach, December 2014, in 2015 she received the Francis Greenburger Award. In May of 2015, Pratt Institute awarded Alison Knowles an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts. Her original Bean Garden is included at the Frieze Art Fair, 2015, Tribute to the Flux-Labyrinth.

Frieze Art Fair is an international contemporary art fair that takes place every October in London’s Regent’s Park. The fair is staged by Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover, the publishers of frieze magazine. Frieze Art Fair features more than 170 contemporary art galleries, and the fair also includes specially commissioned artists’ projects, a talks programme and an artist-led education schedule. Since 2014, the magazine has also been running a New York edition, on Randall’s Island.

James Fuentes, James Fuentes LLC, 55 Delancey Street, New York City, 10002, Phone (212) 577-1201, email: info@jamesfuentes.com, http://www.jamesfuentes.com, Description: Joshua Abelow, Jonathan Allmaier, Lizzi Bougatsos, Brian Degraw, Jessica Dickinson, Berta Fischer, Lonnie Holley, Alison Knowles, John Mcallister, Jonas Mekas, Noam Rappaport, Benjamin Senior, Willam Stone, Daniel Subkoff

Clara Joy is a member of Teenage Instagram Photographers with a following that has exeeded 21,000 daily spectators. She works under several aliases. Her most well known is “softoceans“. Clara Joy considers her work online to be a form of public art. She has also worked as an assistant to Alison Knowles and prepared photo shoots and video shoots of artists’s works for major curatorial venues. She is credited as the photographer for the Alison Knowles page in the Pratt Institute Commencement Catalogue 2015. Clara Joy is one of three granddaughters of Fluxus Founders Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles.

George Maciunas (November 8, 1931 – May 9, 1978) was a Lithuanian-born American artist. He was a founding member and the central coordinator of Fluxus, an international community of artists, architects, composers, and designers. Other leading members brought together by this movement included Ay-O, Joseph Beuys, George Brecht, Dick Higgins, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, and Wolf Vostell. He is most famous for organizing and performing early happenings and for assembling a series of highly influential artists’ multiples.

Pratt Institute is a private, nonsectarian, non-profit institution of higher learning located in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, United States, with a satellite campus located at 14th Street in Manhattan. It originated in 1887 with programs primarily in engineering, architecture, and fine arts. Comprising five schools, the Institute is primarily known for its highly ranked programs in architecture, interior design, and industrial design, and offers both undergraduate and Master’s degree programs in a variety of fields with a strong focus on research. U.S. News & World Report lists Pratt as one of the top 20 colleges in the Regional Universities North category. Princeton Review recognizes Pratt as being one of the best colleges in the northeast, making it among the top 25% of all four-year colleges and universities in the United States.