Alison Knowles made these photo-silkscreen portraits in the early 1970s based on a series of Polaroids she had taken of her friends and audience members performing The Identical Lunch at the New Year’s Eve Flux-Feast at the Fluxhouse Cooperative in SoHo in 1969. Knowles recalled in a 2008 interview with the art historian Jessica Santone, “I got a shower curtain and I isolated a little space in the corner of the room and then I invited particular people to come and I served them a lunch. I had a toaster in there, and I’d mixed up the tuna fish and I had the lettuce. They’d sit down and eat the lunch there and I’d take a Polaroid of them eating and then they could talk to me about whatever” (Alison Knowles, in discussion with Jessica Lynne Santone, 22 October 2008, in Jessica Lynne Santone, “Circulating the Event: The Social Life of Performance Documentation, 1965–1975” [PhD diss., McGill University, 2010], 102). Overall, the portraits strike a balance between individual difference and sameness: the poses are distinctive, while the colors are fairly uniform, and the same corporate logo is stamped across them all—“Compliments of Star-Kist Foods, Inc.” Knowles’s suggestion of official sponsorship by the leading tuna brand StarKist was fraudulent, but she came much closer than one might expect. While teaching at CalArts, a student filmmaker told her that his father was the president of StarKist Foods, and his uncle was the manager of StarKist in California. Through this student, Knowles managed to get a complimentary crate of cans of tuna for another realization of The Identical Lunch at the University of California, Irvine.
The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. © Alison Knowles.
