In response to the invitation from George Maciunas to participate in the New Year’s Eve Flux-Feast at the Fluxhouse Cooperative in SoHo, Alison Knowles realized The Identical Lunch for the first time in such a way that she prepared the lunch and served it to an audience. 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]. The resulting Polaroids then served as the material basis for Knowles’s series of photo-silkscreens on canvas that she made between 1970 and 1973.
The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Courtesy of Billie Maciunas.
