Christopher Knowles

Audio Visual Arts is pleased to present a selection of archived audio works and objects (a Simon and an alarm clock for fun) from the personal collection of Christopher Knowles.

Born in New York City, Knowles has been exhibiting his artwork and participating in readings and performances incorporating his poetry since his teens in the early ’70s. Diagnosed with sustained brain damage as a child from toxoplasmosis, he is perhaps best-known for his text-based “typings,” in which he organizes texts, ranging from lists of top-10 pop songs to single words, into intricate red, black, or green patterns using an electric typewriter. Knowles has also created a significant amount of tape recordings consisting of rhythmically, mathematically, and visually organized poems, often involving repeated variations on a word or phrase. When Knowles was 13, one of his audiotapes was given to avant-garde theater director and playwright Robert Wilson, who invited the teenager to perform in his 1973 production of The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin; Wilson subsequently asked Knowles to contribute text for the libretto of the seminal Wilson/Philip Glass opera Einstein on the Beach (1976), and Wilson and Knowles have maintained a close collaborative partnership ever since. Knowles has had solo exhibitions of his work at venues including Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York; Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna; the Holly Solomon Gallery, New York; The Kitchen, New York; and the Museum Boymans-Van Beuningen in the Netherlands. He has also participated in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Exit Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; and the Musée Galliera, Paris. His poetry has appeared in many publications and anthologies, including The Village Voice, The New Yorker, and Ear magazine.

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This show was developed in collaboration with ESOPUS MAGAZINE. The current issue, ESOPUS 20: SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, celebrates their 10th anniversary and features cassette tape imagery and audio from the Christopher Knowles archives.

Read an interview between archivist Janine St. Germain and ESOPUS magazine regarding the cassette archives of Christopher Knowles by clicking here: http://audiovisualarts.org/6295/ck-interview