About
The Reframing the House of Dust project at CalArts was a response to Fluxus artist Alison Knowles’ legendary House of Dust project, one element of which was sited at CalArts from 1969-71. It was sponsored by the CalArts MA Aesthetics and Politics program in collaboration with Art by Translation, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture and FLAX.
House of Dust began in 1968 as a computer-generated poem, a collaboration between Knowles and James Tenney that experimented with how programming language — in this instance, Fortran — could be employed in chance operations in art making. Each quatrain of the poem consisted of four lines drawn from lists of language compiled by Knowles, indicating a type of house, a material, a site or situation, a light source, and a category of inhabitants. One quatrain of the poem was then “translated” by Knowles into a functional structure, also titled “House of Dust,” which was sited first in a Chelsea housing co-op and then moved to CalArts when Knowles joined the founding faculty in 1969. It read:
A HOUSE OF PLASTIC
IN A METROPOLIS
USING NATURAL LIGHT
INHABITED BY PEOPLE FROM ALL WALKS OF LIFE
When Knowles moved the two part structure to CalArts, she changed the guiding “score” to the following quatrain:
A HOUSE OF DUST
ON OPEN GROUND
USING NATURAL LIGHT
INHABITED BY FRIENDS AND ENEMIES
As Knowles recalls, “I had these huge sculptures coming in on a flatbed truck that had to be activated,[and] I wasn’t going to have them just sit on the land. They were weird-looking things but they were important because the building itself was so unfortunate—I felt you might as well put an apartment house there. So I would have my classes and my meetings out at the House of Dust and we had a rail to run sound lines out there so we could do readings and we had quite a number of food events.”[1]
In January 2018, CalArts students — in collaboration with CalArts Faculty members Ken Ehrlich and Janet Sarbanes and French curators Sebastien Pluot and Maud Jacquin, as well as Knowles herself (via Skype) — designed and built the House of Glass, a new iteration of the House of Dust. To construct the house, students studied the 35-page scroll of the poem on tractor-feed computer paper that resides in the CalArts archive, and chose a different quatrain on which to base a new social sculpture:
A HOUSE OF GLASS
ON AN ISLAND
USING ALL AVAILABLE LIGHTING
INHABITED BY VARIOUS COLLECTORS OF ALL TYPES
The new house was designed in four days and erected over an additional four days. Throughout spring 2018, the newly-built structure served as a site for readings, performances and exhibitions, and a focal point for courses on Fluxus, experimental architecture and housing issues. It was open to all uses by all members of the CalArts community, both informally and formally, via a google calendar. “Reframing the House of Dust” was also the theme of a five-hour series of Fluxus-scored and Fluxus-inspired performances that took place in the House of Glass on 3/23/18, and a day-long symposium at RedCat on 3/24/18.