Taste Economies: Alison Knowles, Gordon Matta-Clark and the intersection of food, time and performance

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Notes

¹ While Proposition: Make a salad is actually listed as Proposition #2 in her book of scores, By Alison Knowles (1965), Knowles has indicated that Shuffle Piece, listed as #1 in the text, was a mistake by the publisher, Dick Higgins.

² As told to Julia Robinson, in more recent iterations of the piece, Knowles has been careful to note that the proposition ‘no longer comes as a surprise’. This is especially true in the case of the 2008 performance at the Tate Modern in London. Here Knowles made and served a salad for more than 2,000 people. See Robinson (2004).

³ Maciunas's 1963 manifesto was a contested document and did not entirely represent the views of the artists who associated (formally or not) with Fluxus.

⁴ The exact date of the work's conception is unclear. Kristine Stiles dates the noontime meditation as 1969, when Corner first observed and recorded the eating ritual, while Knowles and Hannah Higgins note that it began two years prior. See Higgins (2002) and Stiles (1995).

⁵ The intersection of the political and the comestible in artistic practice is addressed in chapter 3 of my dissertation; see Woods (2010).

⁶ Founded as the French Sardine Co. in San Pedro, California in 1918 by Yugoslav immigrant Martin J. Bogdanovich, the cannery helped procure and distribute fish for U.S. troops during World War I. By 1942, the company adopted the StarKist brand name. Knowles's The Identical Lunch screen- prints were recently on display in the Fluxus gallery at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, NY (2012).

⁷ This remembrance is included in a narrative proposal written in which Knowles requested public funding to develop the score further. Ideas for expansion included producing a collaborative video series documenting newer versions of the basic lunch into ‘blind-lunch’, ‘step/on lunch’, ‘drawn/out lunch’, and ‘street lunch’. See Knowles (1973) and Woods (2010).

⁸ Both works have been freshly staged, as curators, galleries, museums and other art institutions are keen on recreating food-based and participatory art performances. For example, Knowles conducted The Identical Lunch Symphony for the symposium ‘Of Hospitality’ for The Smart Museum of Art, University Chicago (May 2012); and Matta-Clark's Food Restaurant was temporarily refabricated for Frieze New York (May 2013), and included Carol Goodden and Tina Girouard as guest chefs.

⁹ I am currently working on a book manuscript that explores this notion explicitly, and looks at several late twentieth- century artists who explore food as an art object and a performance.