Tuesday 7 March 2023, 8pm
“For me, a piece is not really living unless it’s presented, whether it’s music or an event score.” – Alison Knowles
Excited to host a rare presentation of the great American artist, Alison Knowles' event scores, performed by On Yee Lo, Luciano Maggiore, and Li Song.
Known for her installations, performances, soundworks, and publications, Knowles was a founding member of the Fluxus movement, an international network of artists who aspired to merge different artistic media and disciplines. Criteria that have come to distinguish her work as an artist are the arena of performance, the indeterminacy of her event scores resulting in the deauthorization of the work, and the element of tactile participation. She graduated from Pratt Institute in New York with an honors degree in fine art. In May 2015, she was awarded an honorary doctorate degree by Pratt.
In the 1960s, she was an active participant in New York City's downtown art scene, collaborating with influential artists such as John Cage and Marcel Duchamp. During this time she began producing event scores, or performances that rework the everyday into art. Knowles's inclusion of visual, aural, and tactile elements sets her art apart from the work of other Fluxus artists.
"It is important to remember that we are free to make art and poetry out of anything: a loaf of bread, some beans, a hasty jotting on the train." – Alison Knowles
Scores to be performed:
#14 Chair piece for George Brecht (1965)
#2a Variation #1 on Proposition (1964) - make a soup
#3 Nivea Cream Piece (1962) - for Oscar Williams
#15 Wounded Furniture (1965)
#1 Shuffle (1961)
#7 Piece for Any Number of Vocalists (1962)
London-based multidisciplinary artist and cook On Yee Lo (b. Hong Kong), creates and constructs ‘Cooking Instruments’- physical systems where common meals are prepared and consumed which encompass gestures, labour and hospitality. Her performances fold together with experiences of working as both cook and musician within the experimental music communities. These systems unravel her research in culinary techniques and open transformative processes across a variety of social settings. She has exhibited and performed her work at Counterflows Festival Glasgow, LUFF - Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival, SCHIRN Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Cafe OTO, Ikon Gallery, ICA London, Camden Art Centre, Bloomberg New Contemporaries and ARTISSIMA Turin.
Luciano Maggiore is a Palermo-born, London-based musician whose work is characterised by the use of speakers and analogue/digital devices (samplers, CD players, Walkmans, tape recorders) and which addresses the performativity of the musical act, the perception of it, and the obscurity that emanates from it. His interests include mechanisms of sound diffusion, performance, repetition, endurance, non-human animal languages, dance and folklore. With Louie Rice, he started NO-PA/PA-ON, a project that deals with performing score-based works, both acoustic and amplified.
https://lucianomaggiore.blogspot.com/
Li Song is a London-based musician and computer programmer. He performs improvised music with his computer and composes music using electronics and acoustic instruments. His collaborative project with Zhu Wenbo, No Performance, focuses on compositions using environment sounds, acoustic instruments, computer algorithms, and random sequence. He is also a member of computer network music ensemble and research group, [ _ _ _ ], focusing on algorithmic collaboration. Recent works include Two Snare Drums (Infant Tree 2022), [ _ _ _ ] (with Jia Liu and Shuoxin Tan, SUPERPANG 2022) and Text (with Zhu Wenbo, Zoomin' Night 2021).
