Intimacy in the Fluxus Archive: The Case of Dick and Alison

This talk explores the complexities of writing on American Fluxus artists, Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles, whose lives and creative output present unique challenges for art historical research. Unbraiding the intricacies of artistic collaboration through the model of affect relations between Dick, Alison, and their interlocutors—particularly their relationship as a married couple, the entanglements of their personal, professional, and aesthetic commitments through mutually supportive artworks, films, conceptual theater, and publishing—is examined alongside the formation of Knowles’s identity as an artist in her own right within the context of this relationship, beset with its own power dynamics. Surveying the vast and distantly scattered institutional and museum collections that document her life and art (nearly exclusively housed within the archives of male peers), I aim to rethink the critical value of cooperation as a mode of production that, in all of its messiness, holds space for troubling traditional narratives and practices of late modernist art.