Performing Waste, Wasting Performance: The Ecology of Fluxus

Fig 1.

Photograph courtesy of Liz Ligon. Copyright 2012 Liz Ligon.

Never had a salad provoked so many reactions as on April 22, 2012, when Fluxus artist Alison Knowles reenacted her iconic 1962 Make a Salad score event on the High Line, near Chelsea Market in New York. The performance was straightforward; after chopping up, tossing, and throwing the ingredients—such as iceberg and romaine lettuce, frisée, onions—onto a tarpaulin, the artist served the salad to the audience. According to New Yorker reporter Betty Morais, the performance lasted three hours, as the salad making was accompanied by the musical notes of the knives and forks that clashed. The somewhat impatient and disconcerted audience was immersed in an aesthetic experience that confronted the senses with more than visual or even gastronomic impressions alone.

Make a Salad is not only one of Knowles's most famous pieces; it is also one of the most emblematic works of the avant-garde Fluxus movement. In the early 1960s, Fluxus offered a radical alternative to the bourgeois commodification of art by replacing the emphasis on artistic products with a focus on process. Insisting on the moment of production, such as the chopping of lettuce, rather than the final product, Fluxus performances foreground what the spectator does not see—the process of making and also of discarding. Using waste (shredded paper, fabric, feces, etc.) to draw attention to the side effects of mass consumption, these performances open up an artistic alternative to capitalism in which what has been discarded matters again.

This article argues that Knowles's Fluxus performance Make a Salad mobilizes waste to propose an ecological network as an alternative to the capitalist economy. Foregrounding supposedly insignificant matter—lettuce—as part of an aesthetic experience, it contributes to current discussions on materiality that seek to understand how the nonhuman and nonorganic also participate in the arrangement of social relationships between people and their environment. Art is part of this environment, and Knowles's performance helps to think about how art unsettles established hierarchies between human and matter to form a balanced ecological network. Informed by the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour and by the political ecology of things of Jane Bennett, I understand ecology as a network of human and nonhuman actants who create and sustain their shared house (eco- meaning "house" in Greek) through constant interaction. Exploring how Knowles uses waste, this article seeks to demonstrate that instead of using waste per se, Make a Salad performs waste and retools residual excess in an ephemeral art that will not leave any trace. Make a Salad challenges the artist to give visibility, if not agency, to what has been devalued as impure or unworthy of aesthetic consideration. Starting with how Make a Salad fits into the aesthetics of waste proposed by the 1963 Fluxus Manifesto, I nevertheless want to depart from the commonsensical idea that Knowles's performance is just an illustration of Fluxus. Knowles's understanding of waste challenges Fluxus's politics and aesthetics of waste, thereby creating another model of sociality that is rooted in her own ecology.

Fluxus's Aesthetics and Politics of Waste

Fluxus's understanding of waste stands in contrast to our commonsensical view on leftovers and remnants as excessive and unaesthetic. As Stephanie Foote recalls, modern Western society's conception of waste has been defined by negative terms such as "surplus, pollution, contagion, disgust, damage, toxicity, circulation, destruction, contamination."¹ According to that view, waste symbolizes a dirty excess marginalized by capitalistic economy for the well-being of society, an excess that has been devalued as impure. Fluxus, by contrast, performs waste to reverse this devaluation of waste.

"Purge the world of bourgeois sickness!" begs George Maciunas in the 1963 Fluxus Manifesto, comparing bourgeois art to a kind of "dysentery" that should be evacuated through new aesthetic practices to insure the well-being of the social order. Whereas the bourgeois art economy viewed artworks as marketable commodities, Maciunas promotes an antiart that fully involves spectators in experiences with food, animals, and...