Courtesy Alison Knowles

"Bean Rolls" (1963). A box designed by George Maciunas containing 17 tiny scrolls, each with material about beans in songs, recipes, stories, science, and cartoons, etc.

George Brecht Nam June Paik Dieter Roth Daniel Spoerri Emmett Williams Nam June Paik Art Center Group Show Alex Schweder

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Alison Knowles traces her interest in beans to a day in 1968 when she and composer Bill Fontana were collaborating on a piece in her New York studio. Wanting to create an instrument, she grabbed a temple chime she’d recently brought back from Kyoto, and then spontaneously reached into her pantry for a few black beans. Dropping them inside the chime’s cylindrical chamber, she intuitively began to "play" it.

The makeshift instrument was such a success that Knowles began collecting beans, casually storing them in a large stone mortar bowl on her coffee table, which has slowly filled since the ’60s with a wide assortment that has included garbanzos, cranberry poles, scarlet runners, favas, red kidneys, black soys, white soys, and even a rare calypso. Knowles’s collection, like all her pioneering scores for action events and related Fluxus works, embraces indeterminacy. Beans are constantly coming in — often from other countries, sometimes given to her as gifts — and just as constantly going out, in the pockets of friends or colleagues who have paid her a visit. The collection expands and contracts with the flow of traffic in and out of her studio.

Not surprisingly, the composer John Cage, Knowles’s teacher in the early 1960s, had a strong influence on her interest in beans and other common household objects as sources for her early work. (He was adamant about the importance of developing a hobby or area of expertise — his own was mycology, the study of mushrooms.) Thanks to Cage’s mentoring, in the mid-’70s Knowles began to enclose many dozens of beans inside large, handcrafted paper shells, produced with the assistance of expert paper mills. When I visited her SoHo studio, she unhooked a long paper "Bean Turner" from the wall, casually cradled it in her arms, then turned it upside down so that a steady, melodic stream of beans could rush through the inner chamber of its crumpled, pocked, and ridged form. It sounded like an African rain stick, but deeper, lower, and more intimidating.

According to Knowles, "it was destiny that the beans and paper found each other." There are now 12 of the spercussive pieces in existence. Are they sculptures? Are they musical instruments? Are they props to assist in her poetry? The answer is, of course, all of the above. They operate in the interstices of known traditional genres, true "intermedia," to use a term coined by Knowles’s late husband, Dick Higgins — another Fluxus artist, concrete poet, and publisher who took Cage’s New School class along with Knowles and fellow students George Brecht, George Maciunas, and Nam June Paik.

In fact, throughout the 1960s and ’70s, when Higgins’s eclectic and influential Something Else Press was in full swing, artists like Brecht, Dieter Roth, Daniel Spoerri, Jackson MacLow, and Emmett Williams were always dropping in unannounced to work on their books. Knowles acknowledges that her interest in beans — and cooking — also originated in those exciting social moments. Early on, she became skilled at "putting a meal together really fast," and beans were her specialty.

The generous spirit of cooking spontaneously for a growing family can be seen in Knowles’s 1962 Make a Salad performance, which was executed last summer for an audience of 3,000 at Tate London. Knowles tossed a small mountain of lettuce in a "bowl" formed by a giant blue tarp, then served the entire crowd one at a time. Her interest in throwing together a modest meal is also the subject of her famous 1969 score, "The Identical Lunch," which reads, "A tuna sandwich on wheat toast with lettuce and butter (no mayo) and a glass of buttermilk or a cup of soup."

All this is food for thought. As is the implied opportunity to study the sculptural integrity of the single, perfect bean as though it were a polished Brancusi. After my meeting with Knowles, just as I was about to walk to the door, she reached into her mortar bowl and placed a few choice beans in my palm. I walked away with one tiny Mexican red jumping bean, a few browns, and to my surprise, that extra-rare calypso — the start of my own collection, and maybe even the seed of a musical instrument. 

Alison Knowles’s work will be on view at Stella A. Galerie / Edition in Berlin from Apr. 17 to May 30.