Marcel Duchamp and Alison Knowles | Color Swatch

Marcel Duchamp and Alison Knowles

Color Swatch

19 x 14.6 cm.

Unique

Last month this work sold at Christie’s auction house for $50,800 US, more than twice its high estimate of between $15,000 and $ 20,000. 

The Association Marcel Duchamp confirmed the authenticity, and the following ‘essay’ accompanied the sale: 

"Executed in 1968, Color Swatch belongs to the final, quietly subversive chapter of Marcel Duchamp’s career, when the artist distilled his lifelong interrogation of authorship and choice into gestures of striking economy. At first glance, the composition—two overlapping discs, one red, one blue, suspended against a black ground—appears almost disarmingly simple. Yet its origins lie in a moment of selection rather than invention: Duchamp chose the configuration from a group of color swatches, elevating it through the act of designation.

The present work relates to a small silkscreen project conceived in dialogue with the Fluxus artist Alison Knowles, whose close association with Duchamp underscores the collaborative and process-oriented spirit of the piece. What emerges is less a conventional work than a meditation on perception and authorship: an image that hovers between design, experiment, and readymade."

Knowles’ account from her website contradicts at least the “close association”: 

"Through Daniel Spoerri, the Something Else Press arranged to meet Marcel Duchamp. [The] screen print was preceded by a four by five colour swatch showing two circles one red, one blue. He selected this color swatch one day while we are having tea at his tenth street apartment in New York. There were eleven color swatches, each showing blue and red circles but in different intensities. He selected one and left it out on table saying "Oh, that's it." I put the others in my brief case and we kept talking. Teeny Duchamp walked by the table, saw the color swatch and said "MARCEL, when did you do this?" He asked for a pencil, smiled and signed the color swatch. This color swatch was quickly framed and the rumor quickly spread through New York that we had Duchamp's last readymade! I kept this little swatch for about a year and then sold it to a collecter in Remsheid. Richard Hamilton, to whom I gave a copy of the final print, called this work a piece of memorabilia, not a readymade. Duchamp died the following year but I am sure he would have agreed. I like the story very much because it describes the process as important as the product according to a master."

The Something Else Press (which Knowles co-founded with her husband Dick Higgins) had arranged to use Duchamp’s Coeurs Volants (Flying Hearts) graphic as the cover to Emmett Williams long-form Concrete Poem Sweethearts [below, top]. The image is a proto-Op-Art collage Duchamp made in 1936 for the cover of an issue of Cahiers d’art [see below, centre] which featured an essay by Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia (ex-wife of Francis Picabia) on Duchamp’s optical machines and experiments. It is composed of a blue heart inside a red heart, inside a blue. If the viewer squints, or looks away slightly, the vibrant colours cause the work to throb, pulse or flutter.1

According to Peter Frank’s Something Else Press: An Annotated Bibliography, Higgins and Williams decided to capitalize on “Duchamp’s assent” by publishing a silkscreen poster, which would be produced by Knowles. Reportedly only twenty-two copies turned out satisfactorily. 

The collector in Remsheid that Knowles sold the signed swatch to was Vice-Versand publisher Wolfgang Feelisch. 

Calling this a work a ‘readymade’ by Duchamp takes his notion of an artistic exploration of authorship and repurposes it to one of finance and provenance. It brings to mind the phrase "an angry nihilism”,

which conservative writer Robert Fulford used to describe all of Duchamp’s readymades.2 

1. One of my favourite works by General Idea appropriates, infects and deactivates Coeurs Volants (Flying Hearts), see below, bottom, and next post. 

2. Writing for the right-wing National Post in 2015, Fulford went on to say that "Duchamp must have imagined it would soon be forgotten, but critics and journalists put it in books that established it as a historic breakthrough”, suggesting that the result is all art has become "hopelessly debased”. However, later in life Duchamp told his biographer Calvin Tompkins: "I'm not at all sure that the concept of the readymade isn't the most important single idea to come out of my work."

"Which, a lot going on here, starting with Richard Hamilton of all people being kind of a bitch about Duchamp memorabilia, especially after getting a copy of the print. But they’re both not wrong, and I’m sure Duchamp would have approved of the mess.

I don’t think I’m so into Knowles’ takeaway from the story, though I am very interested in what she took away from the meeting, namely the other ten other color swatches that she made, and Duchamp touched but didn’t sign. That Duchamp memorabilia sets my heart aflutter.

But let’s put all that aside and conjure up in our minds the world inside the sentence, “the color swatch was quickly framed and the rumor quickly spread through New York that we had Duchamp’s last readymade!””

- Greg Allen, greg.org

Alison Knowles Obituaries

https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/alison-knowles-dead-make-a-salad-fluxus-1234759536/

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-alison-knowles-turned-everyday-events-art-died-92

https://hyperallergic.com/1054017/alison-knowles-the-first-woman-of-fluxus-dies-at-92/

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/31/arts/alison-knowles-dead.html

Dick Higgins

Google translated from Italian: 

"Thursday 25 September 2025 5:00 pm University Library of Genoa Presentation of the book "Dick Higgins. Intermedia and other theoretical writings" Edi. Abscondita Caterina Gualco talks with the author: Patrizio Peterlini”

New and Neglected

Things have been on auto-pilot for a while now, but above are some recent arrivals or things I’ve been meaning to get to, and will soon, including works by or about: David Hammons, Daniel Johnston, Joshua Schwebel, Brian Eno, Patrick Lundeen, Jon Klassen, and Bonnie Marranca on Dick Higgins. 

Alison Knowles | Natural Assemblages and the True Crow

Alison Knowles

Natural Assemblages and the True Crow

New York City USA: Printed Editions, 1980

[unpaginated], 21 x 15 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

A book of poetry and images produced by the original xerox machine at the Rochester School of Visual Studies. The objects and words are “found.” The title is dedicated to Dick Higgins, to whom Knowles was married for ten years, divorced for ten and then remarried again for the final decade of his life. 

"The project developed from VSW's invitation to work with the old Haloid-Xerox equipment. The objects | worked with were a battery pack and a hydraulic can top. These objects went through various voltage, time and size changes over an intense three-day period. The content of the work is the effect of dark and light on the two objects, achieved by manipulating the slow process of the original Haloid-Xerox copy machine. | am also interested in the ways of nature. The fog and light forms the copier produced and the grainy texture made a nice background to float the nature clips about birds and frogs and about my father and me raising chickens. This text runs along the bottom. So, the content would be a collage of meanings including the diary and the nature inserts in an imaginary landscape of pages. You could call the hydraulic can top and the battery pack performers in the book. A small circle and lines on each print became like a moon with scattered clouds. These turned out to be simply scratches on the plate and added a great deal to the final image in my opinion. This original Xerox machine reminds me of the early mainframe computers that would fill a room like a small car! These early versions of tools we have come to depend on were far more interesting in their original forms, now completely unavailable. For example, the Haloid’s processor made it possible to manipulate the image, to draw right into it with an electrostatic wand and actually move the toner around on the plate. In the case of Natural Assemblages and the True Crow, areas of chiaroscuro and bright light could be designed by the performer (artist). The speed of Xerox machines today wipes out the possibility of manipulating within the process. This concept relates to all my work—the desire to catch the moment in the process and change it."

—Alison Knowles

 

Structure No. 1, Spring 1968

John J. Sharkey

Structure No. 1, Spring 1968

London, UK: Structure Publications, 1968

24 pp., 25.5 x 20.5 cm., staple-bound

Edition size unknown

The debut issue of Structure magazine laid out it’s mission as follows: 

"Structure will attempt to explore the concepts of potential environmental structures and their actual realisation in social terms, art of play. It will also explore the structural elements of environments as well as the creative possibilities and aesthetic extensions into dance, theatre, music, poetry, colour and light."

However, the first issue - of what was intended as a quarterly journal - was also its last. 

The twenty-four page magazine featured Dick Higgins' Some Graphis Mirrors (see below), Jeffrey Shaw’s "expanded cinema environment and eventstructure” work Corpocinema, artist/activist Jean Toche's Manifesto 1 for a Theatre of Human Destruction, poetry by editor John J. Sharkey and works by Al Hansen, Theo Botschuiver, Jack Collom, Brendon O'Regan, Ivor Davies, Jackie Cassen, Rudi Stern, John J Lobell, Michael Steiner, Stephen Willats and others. 

The front and back cover feature images by Dutch photographer Pieter Boersma of inflatable works by the Event Structure Research group (ERG). 

The issue is somewhat scarce and typically sells for a few hundred dollars. If securing the rights wasn’t a complete nightmare, someone should publish a compendium of single-issue magazines of the ‘avant-garde’. 

Primary Information Sale

For the next 24 hours, all titles at the Primary Information site are discounted by 50%. 

The above collection of three Something Else Press works is available for only five dollars, for example. The new Fluxus newspaper reprint is only ten dollars. 

https://primaryinformation.org/

Camille's Reports #1

Dick Higgins/Something Else Press

Camille's Reports #1

New York City, USA: Something Else Press, [1965]

8.2 x 13.9 cm.

Edition size unknown

Camille Gordon is the alter-ego of Dick Higgins, and later possibly other artists who worked for the press (Emmett Williams, Ken Friedman, etc.) who found it awkward promoting their own publications. 

In the early days of the press, Higgins was the sole employee, serving as editor, designer, producer, and press strategist. He wrote the newsletters and the dust jacket blurbs for the books. This sometimes put him in the awkward position of having to write effusively about one of his own works. The name Camille Gordon was used to thwart this problem, and also make the press seem less like an outfit operating out of someone’s living room. 

This is the first of twelve "news cards" mailed out by the Something Else Press to advertise forthcoming titles. The format was eventually retired in favour of the newsletters, which “Gordon” also contributed to. 

The character was killed off in Newscard #12 ("killed on Route-1 when her car smashed into a chicken truck”) but then resurrected again in the Something Else Newlsetter, Vol. 1, No. 7 ("It isn't true. She's gone to Afghanistan, to Mazar-i-Sharif, with her fiancé, a folk song collector [...] we're awfully glad to hear she's okay”). 

A second pseudonym used was "Charles Gagnon" whose initials are also C.G. and for Dick Higgins sound like the French adverb ci-gît, which means "here lies.” 

Abebooks lists three copies of this title, between $125 and $250 US. Currently Division Leap is selling the above example on Ebay, with a current bid of $15.00, here. 

"I once played a joke with Dick’s pseudonym. A female photographer friend of mine had been hired by the New York Review of Sex, one of many tabloids that sprang up in the mid-sixties touting the new sexual freedoms, to shoot prostitutes and their pimps in Times Square. While she managed to do this very discreetly, she was afraid of having her name credited in the published spread. I offered, and she used, Camille Gordon. This upset Dick, so I never let on until now that it was my doing.”

- Barbara Moore