The unusual performance by Philip Corner and Alison Knowles
The composer, improvisational pianist, music theorist, and artist Philip Corner chose the book as the best artistic medium to express how the human relationship with food can be both absurd and utterly predictable.
Corner was one of the founders of the Fluxus movement and taught Modern Music at the New School for Social Research from 1967 to 1970, succeeding John Cage, an iconic figure in the evolution of modern sound. Corner worked with the concept of performance proposals, during which he would lead participants into a kind of ecstatic semi-trance. His interaction with artists from other disciplines, particularly dance and visual arts, along with a deepening interest in Eastern religions and the study of Baroque music, influenced his compositional activity. He transformed musical scores into graphic signs created through painterly gestures.
In the book The Identical Lunch (1973), Corner faithfully documented the same lunch that artist Alison Knowles would eat every day at the same time and in the same place, at Flatiron Lunch Riss Food, in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York. The meal consisted of a tuna sandwich on whole wheat toast with lettuce and butter, no mayonnaise, accompanied by a glass of milk or a cup of the soup of the day.
Corner took note of this habit and formalized it into a performance dedicated to meditating on everyday pleasures. Knowles extended the culinary ritual to her artist friends Susan Hartung, John Giorno, Dick Higgins, and Vernon Hinkle, inviting them to repeatedly experience the same lunch and then write about it using various mediums and formats, from typewriters to handwritten notes. Together with Corner, Knowles highlighted the seriality and repetition inherent in the act of eating as a kind of formula that, within daily routine, can awaken creative energy.
