Christopher Knowles
Typings (1974 - 1977)
New York City, USA : Vehicle Editions, 1979
[110 pp.], 28.6 x 25.8 cm., cloth
Edition of 500, unsigned and unnumbered copies
Christopher Knowles was thirteen years old when a family friend passed a cassette of his to playwright Robert Wilson. Titled "Emily Likes the TV”, the tape featured the young Knowles reciting the title phrase repeatedly, creating rhythmic repetitions and variations on the phrase "Emily likes the TV, because she watches the TV, because she likes it.” An adult Knowles can be seen reciting the work on Youtube, here.
The audio poem brings to mind Steve Reich’s early vocal tape experiments like "It’s Gonna Rain" and "Come Out”, or the Modest Mouse song “Parting of the Sensory” in which a single phrase is repeated over and over again, with very slight alterations. Just enough to make singing along difficult.
"I began to realize that the words flowed to a patterned rhythm whose logic was self-supporting,” said Wilson, later. "It was a piece coded much like music. Like a cantata or fugue it worked with conjugations of thoughts repeated in variations."
Wilson cast the teenage Knowles in a number of his productions, including his breakout (and still best known work) Einstein on the Beach, which contains some texts from this book. Wilson’s collaborator Philip Glass credits the texts with inspiring his contributions to the now-legendary musical.
Knowles reportedly would create poems and paintings by signing lower right hand side of the page, and then working backwards to fill it with content.
Poet John Ashbery wrote "Christopher has the ability to conceive of his works in minute detail before executing them. There is nothing accidental in the typed designs and word lists; they fill their preordained places as accurately as though they had spilled out of a computer. This pure conceptualism, which others have merely approximated using mechanical aids, is one reason that so many young artists have been drawn to Christopher’s work."
This 1979 hardcover volume [a softcover edition of 1000 copies was released simultaneously, see below] collects poems, texts and drawings made using the typewriter when the poet/painter was between the ages of 14 and 18.
"Christopher Knowles’ peculiar plastic management of words is the consequence of neurological damage he sustained before birth, which led to a form of autism. A self-taped recording of his speech-poems brought him, as a teenager in 1973, to the attention of the theatre and opera director Robert Wilson, and he has acted in and contributed dialogue to many performances since then. …
(In Knowles’ works) standard white stationery and long sheets of rice paper become settings for typed pictograms of alarm clocks, a window, a space needle and chequerboard patterns, all made up of accumulations of the letter ‘C’, Knowles’ first initial. His ‘typings’ show a preoccupation with repetition, permutation and seriality – qualities so dear to classic Minimalist art. Yet Knowles’ favoured formats in these typed works are music charts, where titles and careers are restacked and resculpted in permutations according to popular or personal whim. …
Knowles’ ‘typings’ build up words and phrases into intricate multi-coloured patterns using an electric typewriter. He is best known for his ‘typings’ of the 1970s and 80s, text-based pieces that were developed as a private pastime. The exceptional ability in mathematical organisation revealed in these works is a characteristic by-product of the autism which Knowles was diagnosed as a child. The works were created on an electric typewriter, using red, black and green inks."
- Max Andrews, Frieze
