Book Objects and Loose Page Sculptures
In the early 1960s, published by Something Else Press, Knowles composed the Notations book of experimental composition with John Cage and Coeurs Volants and 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 object, a can of texts and beans called the Bean Rolls. In 1967, Knowles and James Tenney produced the computerized poem The House of Dust. A sound installation for a House of Dust public sculpture was produced by Max Neuhaus.
In 1967, Knowles created the Big Book, an 8-foot-tall (2.4 m) book of environments organized around a spine, which opened at the Frankfurter Buchmesse and toured through Europe. The book was eventually destroyed. In 1982, with the help of Franklin Furnace, Knowles produced a second large-scale book called The Book of Bean. Several pages of this book can be found at Museo Vostell in Extremadura, Spain. In 1985, Knowles created a smaller book of tactile languages called A Finger Book of Ancient Language. This book consisted of seven 11-inch-high (280 mm) pages all in braille and was shown at the Lighthouse for the Blind in New York. She has also produced and written several books of experimental text and poetry.
Knowles' 1983 book Loose Pages, originally produced in collaboration with Coco Gordon, consisted of pages made for each part of the body. In her other page sculptures, the audience physically stands in the page and enters it with one or more body parts. Her 1989 Mahogany Arm Rest and 1992 We Have no Bread invited the viewer to engage directly with their four to five meter pages.
Read more about this topic: Alison Knowles
Famous quotes containing the words book, objects, loose and/or page:
“A healthy man, with steady employment, as wood-chopping at fifty cents a cord, and a camp in the woods, will not be a good subject for Christianity. The New Testament may be a choice book to him on some, but not on all or most of his days. He will rather go a-fishing in his leisure hours. The Apostles, though they were fishers too, were of the solemn race of sea-fishers, and never trolled for pickerel on inland streams.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is an inexpressible Pleasure to know a little of the World, and be of no Character or Significancy in it. To be ever unconcerned, and ever looking on new Objects with an endless Curiosity, is a Delight known only to those who are turned for Speculation: Nay, they who enjoy it, must value things only as they are the Objects of Speculation, without drawing any worldly Advantage to themselves from them, but just as they are what contribute to their Amusement, or the Improvement of the Mind.”
—Richard Steele (1672–1729)
“My temptation is quiet.
Here at life’s end
Neither loose imagination,
Nor the mill of the mind
Consuming its rag and bone,
Can make the truth known.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;Mthey are the life, the soul of reading!—take them out of this book, for instance,—you might as well take the book along with them;Mone cold external winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer;Mhe steps forth like a bridegroom,—bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)