CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/14/2022

Really good vibes in 'By Alison Knowles'

Featured image is from By Alison Knowles: A Retrospective (1960–2022), published to accompany the first comprehensive exhibition on the artist's work, on view at Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive. A book we are very proud to have co-published, this 300-page goldmine features different colored papers for each section, die-cut dividers and a fully illustrated chronology of the Fluxus pioneer's experiments in painting, printmaking, sculpture, installation, sound works, poetry and artist’s books over the past 60 years. Additionally, the cover of the book is a makeready (press sheet gathered from printing the interior of the book) produced during the printing of the interior pages. So each cover in the edition is unique.This particular image captures Knowles' 1971 iteration of The House of Dust on the campus of CalArts in Valencia, California. It derived from what was possibly the first computerized poem in the United States, which Knowles produced with experimental composer and Bell Labs resident James Tenney in 1967. The first line of the poem's score was used to build the first physical sculpture of The House of Dust in New York in 1969. Since then, regardless of the materials used or the specific stanza being activated, the project has remained known as The House of Dust.