Alison Knowles. Proposition #2: Make a Salad.

A score of three words

Alison Knowles's entire score is a single instruction: Make a salad. No number of performers, no duration, no recipe. Anyone who reads the line can perform it.

Knowles called it her first score. In Fluxus, a text like this is an event score: a short instruction, sometimes a single line, that turns an everyday act into a performance. Music no longer lives on the staff. It lives in the action.

The idea sounds simple, but it shifts the artist's position. The writer no longer controls each detail. Which greens, which bowl, which room, who eats: every performance decides for itself.

The strength of the instruction is that it asks for no skill. No need to read music, no need to act. Anyone who has stood at a kitchen counter has performed this score hundreds of times without knowing it. Knowles only changed the frame: she brought the task into a room with an audience and asked people to watch it the way they would watch a concert.

The night of 21 October 1962

Knowles first performed Make a Salad on 21 October 1962 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. The evening was tied to the first Fluxus concert tour of Europe, when a group of young artists moved from city to city with scores made of actions.

Travelling light, she had little with her. To mix a salad for a whole room, she borrowed a pickle barrel from Crosse & Blackwell, the long established British food company. The barrel became the bowl.

She made a large green salad from fresh ingredients and carried plates out to the audience. A black and white photograph from that night, now at the Getty Research Institute, shows Knowles second from the right, holding a plate, among the people watching.

Chopped to a beat, tossed in the air

Across its restagings, Make a Salad took on a familiar shape. There is live music. Knowles and her fellow performers chop vegetables to its beat. The knife on the board becomes part of the sound. Then the greens are tossed in the air to mix, and the salad is served to everyone present.

In 2008 the piece was performed at Tate Modern in London. Knowles chopped alongside her daughter, Jessica Higgins, to live music.

On 22 April 2012, Make a Salad came to the High Line in New York, in the Chelsea Market Passage. There were greens for about a thousand people: lettuces, carrots, cucumbers, onions, celery, mushrooms. The salad was tossed from the upper level of the passage to the lower, then served to those standing below.

Half a century after the first night, the score was still three words. Only the bowl had grown.

The smell of an ordinary act

Make a Salad is usually discussed as a work about sound and sharing. It is also a work of smell. Freshly cut greens have a particular smell, green, wet, a little sharp. When hundreds of leaves are cut at once in a closed room, that smell becomes impossible to ignore.

Nothing about the smell is designed. It comes from the work of cutting. It is gone once the salad is eaten. No museum can hold it; only the photograph and the three word score remain.

There is something else. The smell of cut greens is never the same twice. London in 1962 was not New York in 2012: different season, different air, different crowd. The score stays fixed; the smell changes every time.

Seen this way, Make a Salad stands near others of the period who brought meals into art, like Daniel Spoerri with his restaurant and his glued down tables. But Knowles kept nothing. She let the work be eaten.