John Knight — Some Works

The exhibition Some Works comprised 15 works by John Knight, made between 1969 and 1990, including Levels and The Journal Series.

Since 1969, American artist John Knight (1945) has concentrated on the relationship between architecture, design and art. He bases his work on the interplay between the material object and its contextual conditions, and comments on the meaning of cultural object and cultural space by employing strategies that invert the conventions of production and reception.
Knight’s early sculptural work, such as Levels (1969), deliberately set itself apart from the innovations of the early sixties of such Minimal artistsas Carl Andre, Dan Flavin and Sol LeWitt. Consisting of carpenter levels arranged on the floor, Levels referred to the basic, reduced shapes of Minimal sculpture, and at the same time engendered an interchange with its physical setting. Employing actual tools of representation as well as of construction, Knight’s works do not merely refer to their site. They incur an overt dialogue with their site, providing a reading of the one in terms of the other.

By the second half of the seventies, Knight extended the concept of location to a consideration of the work’s place within a cultural system. He started investigating representational systems in conjunction with art and non-art support systems. The Journal Series (1978), for example, transformed a non-art object, a magazine, into one that could gain artistic status in a specific artistic context. In this project, Knight mailed 100 gift subscriptions of glossy popular journalsm to friends and acquaintances. The recipient determined whether his subscription was art, interpreting it either as a work by Knight or as an ordinary magazine. With The Journal Series, Knight re-presented existing, non-art representations within the framework of art in order to explore the point at which art and non-art systems overlap, and to investigate the factors that determine an object’s status and worth.