Performing Chance: The Art of Alison Knowles In/Out of Fluxus is the first monograph of American artist, Alison Knowles (b. 1933), the only female member among Fluxus' founding ranks. It charts Knowles's transformative corpus as it evolved from abstract painting in the late 1950s, to silkscreens, print media, and performance in the early 1960s, to groundbreaking works in digital poetry, acoustical art, and large-scale installations in the late 1960s–1970s. In particular, it situates Knowles within the discursive apparatus of earth art projects of the era, comparing her work, for the first time in the historical literature, with the built-environments of, for example, Mary Miss and Alice Aycock. Broadly speaking, the book expands our understanding of the post-WWII cultural landscape by analyzing the rapid proliferation of indeterminate outcomes as a viable mode for interdisciplinarity—not simply and uncritically aping the aleatory activities of the experimental composer John Cage, as is often the charge, but rather, through a proto-feminist dialectic of chance. The manuscript has been significantly broadened and deepened by additional archival research, much of it previously unpublished.

Performing Chance is the first monographic study of American artist Alison Knowles, a significant yet overlooked cofounder of the Fluxus movement and a pioneering visual artist of performance, conceptual, computational, and installation art. The book focuses on Knowles’s transformative body of work as it evolved from abstract painting in the late 1950s, to silkscreens, print media, and performance in the early 1960s, to groundbreaking works in digital poetry, acoustical art, and large-scale installations in the late 1960s–70s. Through access to previously unpublished archival materials and direct interviews with the artist, this meticulously researched book provides close readings of pivotal works, disclosing the ways Knowles instituted formal tactics that moved beyond modernist painting, championed principles of indeterminacy and chance, and fostered sociopolitical consciousness. Situating Knowles’s innovations in various media within the distinct cultural contexts of Wiesbaden, London, Paris, New York City, and Los Angeles, Performing Chance brings this key artist back to her rightful place as a leader of the postwar avant-garde and provides a nuanced history of the role of women artists in Fluxus and beyond.

Nicole L. Woods is a Los Angeles based art historian and critic. Her writing and research has been generously supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation/Arts Writers Grant, The Getty Research Library, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, The National Gallery of Art, and Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others. She teaches modern and contemporary art at Loyola Marymount University.