Interview with Christopher Knight / The Brooklyn Rail

On a recent trip to Los Angeles, Rail Managing Art Editor Patricia Milder met longtime Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight for a late-November outdoor lunch on Ventura Boulevard, over which they discussed his life and work.

Patricia Milder (Rail): In Dave Hickey’s introduction to your book of collected criticism, he brushes over what happens in your life on the East Coast and starts with L.A.

Christopher Knight: That’s because I’ve been trying to forget. [Laughs.]

Rail: Well, he does mention that you went to school in New York state. Where was that?


Knight: State University at Binghamton. I did my masters and doctorate coursework there. I did everything but my dissertation and then I fled.

Rail: You didn’t want to be an art historian?

Knight: Well, I was planning on it. I had lined up a Guggenheim research grant and I was writing my dissertation on Robert Smithson. I thought I knew what I was going to be doing for the next year or so, but in March I got a phone call from a friend in L.A. at the County Museum, who said there was a curatorial job open in La Jolla and that I should apply for it. She said, “You’ve never been to California and never been to L.A. At least if you apply for the job they will probably bring you out for an interview.” And I thought, “There’s a good idea,” since there was, you know, 30 feet of snow in upstate New York at the time. So sure enough I applied, they brought me out for an interview, I got off the plane at LAX and thought, “Wow. I’m home.”

Rail: Where did you actually grow up? And did you have an interest in art as a child?

Knight: No, that happened during my senior year in high school. I grew up in a very small town in the Berkshires.

Rail: Must have been beautiful there.

Knight: It’s a great place to be from, near Great Barrington. There was just no reason to know about art there. But I had a really great French teacher in high school, and she organized an outing to the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown. We went to look at French painting and then have lunch at a French restaurant, and the whole day was to be spoken in French. That didn’t happen. But Friday was always French culture day. She had these big reproductions of French paintings that she would use like flashcards that she would hold up and we had to memorize artist, title, date, and style. Everyone in class hated it but me. I thought this was, like, totally cool. So when I went to the Clark I was like, “Well, look at that, there are the actual paintings, not reproductions.” And that was what got me interested.

Rail: So when you eventually arrived in Los Angeles, you took the job, but you didn’t stay at the La Jolla museum for very long.

Knight: Three years. I got out of the museum business when the director asked me to participate in a kickback scheme from a commercial gallery. Not for personal gain, but he was going to buy this very expensive and completely inappropriate work for the museum because the dealer was going to give him a kickback from the commission, which he was going to use to fund the curatorial travel budget. “No,” I thought, “you’re not doing that”—so I went to the president of the board and she thought it was the funniest thing she had ever heard. So I quit.

Rail: And then you got the job at the Herald Examiner?

Knight: As we call it, the late, lamented Herald Examiner, which was a totally great place for about 10 years. After I had left La Jolla and had come up to L.A., I wrote a couple of gallery reviews for Artforum and stuff like that, but I had no thought of being a critic and I knew nothing about journalism, that’s for sure. Literally, I got a phone call one day from an editor at the Herald saying he was looking for freelancers, that someone had given them my name, and would I be interested in trying out some things. I said sure, and then he said, “Can you send me clips of stuff you’ve done in newspapers?” I said, “No. I can send you clip.” I’d written one piece for the San Diego Reader, which was the weekly alternative paper. It’s the first essay in the book, “Miss Piggy and the ‘Pieta.’” Later, he told me that when they read that, they knew they were going to hire me.

Rail: That essay is surprisingly mature and developed for a first piece.

Knight: Thanks, and it still seems weirdly relevant, much to my horror.

Rail: Yes, and threads that you continue throughout your career are already visible in it, as if you already knew what was important to you or what needed to be said.

Knight: Well, I’ve always been interested in pop culture. Also, I subscribe to the Baby Duck Theory, which is that the moment that you come into art and become conscious of it, you get imprinted with whatever is happening at that time. So for me that was around 1968: it’s Pop, Minimal, conceptual, early video. That’s where I got imprinted.

Rail: So were you writing weekly for the Examiner?

Knight: More like twice a week, which was a great way to get into it. When people ask me, “How do you learn to write about art?” I always say that the only way to learn is by doing it a lot, over and over and over. You either learn it, or you don’t. It’s also a great way to make a fool of yourself in public, which is very, very useful and important. So I do that a lot. It breeds humility. Those mornings when you wake up and think, “Well, if I got in my car right now, how many houses could I get to and get the paper off the front stoop?”

Rail: You don’t still have those mornings, do you?

Knight: Oh, sure. Although the Internet has interfered.

Rail: Can we talk about L.A. for a little bit? I’m from L.A. and I still love it, but since I’ve lived in New York and become accustomed to this lifestyle where you can do 10 things in one day and see a ton of galleries all at once if you want to, it’s always a challenge, when I’m here in town, to figure out how to see the art. I mean, my parents live in Culver City, which is where so many of the galleries on the Westside are, and I can’t even quite figure out how to get around to all of them in a reasonable way. It’s this completely different style of doing things.

Knight: Well, speaking of Dave Hickey, he once said something about going to L.A. galleries, which is true. He said, “If you spend as much time looking at the show as it took you to drive to the gallery, it’s probably a good show.” On Fridays we do this rotating gallery column, and a couple of years ago I had done the column and I was looking at it in the paper and I thought, “There’s a show in Santa Monica, a show in Culver City, a show in Chinatown, and a show in Pomona. The distance between the gallery in Santa Monica and the gallery in Pomona is 45 miles. If I had started in Chelsea, I would be in Morristown, New Jersey.”

Rail: Well, with Brooklyn galleries I think you run into some of the same problems as in L.A., since they are more spread out. You have destination galleries and you have to know where you’re going.

Knight: The worst for me is going to a destination gallery, which is usually a small place, and you get there, and it’s closed. And there is a sign on the door, you know, “Back at 1:30.” That’s almost the only time I use my business cards from the Times. I slip one under the door, and wait for them to freak out.

Rail: That’s funny. What do you think about Bergamot Station? I just saw the Alberto Burri show there, which was great. I’d never been before to the little museum they have there.

Knight: They do some interesting stuff. I mean, I think the interesting thing about Burri was that even though he was in L.A. a lot of the early years that I lived here, he didn’t exist. He was a complete hermit, he was not part of anything, and he stayed by himself. Actually, he lived up here just off of Mulholland, right in back of David Hockney’s house.

Rail: Hmm, wow.

Knight: Yeah, just a little enclave of foreign painters. Which is weird, that he’s living up here doing these things that no one knows about.

Rail: Except, I’ve heard it said that Robert Rauschenberg was influenced by him, which makes sense. Gagosian has that huge Rauschenberg show up right now, so he’s on my mind.

Knight: Well, speaking of art and popular culture, Rauschenberg is a great example. He decided to become an artist when he went to the Huntington in San Marino and saw Gainsborough’s “Blue Boy.” He was working in a psych hospital in San Diego because he was a conscientious objector, and he took the day off and came up to the Huntington and walked into the English portraiture gallery and there was this painting that he had seen on a tea towel, and he thought, “Oh my God, people make these things,” and that was when he decided to become an artist.

Rail: That’s a good story. I just went to a talk about Rauschenberg by an artist named Gary Nichols, who was an assistant of Rauschenberg’s. It was really interesting because he talked about the art and its creation from the artist’s perspective. It was a great talk, but it made me think about how different the critic’s job and the artist’s job can be. Do you think it’s important to have ideas about what things mean and what things are beyond even the artist’s ideas?

Knight: I think for a critic, the artist’s intent doesn’t really matter. Artist’s intent is important for art historians, but not for critics. I write about art in order to find out what I think.

Rail: About art and also about the context and the culture.

Knight: I’m a big John Dewey-ite. I think pragmatist philosophy is the most coherent approach to art that I’m aware of. The art is the experience, not the object. So that’s what I’m interested in trying to articulate. It’s an imperfect analogy, but I sometimes try to explain it with pottery—ceramics—since that is one of the oldest continuous art forms there is. A pot has a certain kind of a shape, and you can put all kinds of things into it, but you can’t put everything into it because not everything fits. So the shape of the thing, the form that it takes, has a general contour, but what you can put into it is as varied as the people who experience it.

Read the full interview in the Rail Here

Keeping it Realness / The Brooklyn Rail

Keith Hennessy’s Crotch (all the Joseph Beuys references in the world cannot heal the pain, confusion, regret, cruelty, betrayal or trauma…) was a high point of American Realness, Benjamin Pryor’s second annual festival of contemporary performance, which spanned the second weekend in January at the Abrons Arts Center. During his show, Hennessy seemed to evoke the seminal artist’s ancient, strange magic, as if Beuys’s healing essence had been carried through time, fulfilling the promise of his ritualistic performance actions as he intended them: seeds to promote actions by others. I think he traveled through the hot breath of the individuals gathered on stage around the nude, glittered, simultaneously tension- and relief-soaked Hennessy. Ideas such as Beuys’s may lead an independent life, but it’s only through the right artistic catalyst that they can morph into raw performance energy, more deeply sensed than intellectually understood.

Hennessy performed sections of the piece as they were laid out in his score: an audience wandering on stage amid his and Beuys’s symbolic materials, a cleverly edited seven-minute lecture on the history of art, an underwear-clad dance in a Scream mask, and the final close circling in of the audience around him on stage. The night I saw Crotch, Hennessy spoke about previous performances of the piece, the way the audience interacted with it, and how it has changed because of that interaction. The “should he wear underwear or pants for the dance” question, for example, was one he felt all audiences answered the same way. As he took off his pants, he said there was no use in asking, that everyone always said “underwear.” He told us to take care of each other as we came up to the stage for the final section; he wanted to make sure that all could see.

Performance art can just as easily become an object as a painting or sculpture that gets stuck in its own materiality, denying the viewer a “real” experience. Many of the American Realness artists speak directly to the audience, acknowledging both the specific environment and their own artist-roles and imperfections in those roles; they’re attempting to take the performance beyond the materials of construction and into genuine experience. This particular way of becoming more human, of challenging the conventions of performance (specifically in a dance context), is almost overwhelmingly popular among a certain set these days. The technique itself now has the potential to objectify a performance; still, the transformative promise of confessional language remains. Communing directly with an audience has become like executing any formalized technique: some do it more successfully than others.


THEM by Ishmael Houston-Jones at Abrons Arts Center during American Realness. Photo by Ian Douglas, courtesy tbspMGMT.
I’m ambivalent about Ann Liv Young’s mean-girl persona. But her Mermaid Solo is an excellent example of how well-designed naturalism, specifically in the context of sensationalistic sadomasochism, can give viewers an experience of “realness.” At first, she lay calmly in a kiddie pool, naked from the waist up and wearing a large fish tail on her lower half. Before long, courtesy of the tail, the water was out of the pool and onto the audience, who began seated in a circle around Ann Liv the mermaid; some of them were soon huddled by the door or standing with their backs flush to the wall, gripping coats and purses up and away from the fishy water. The energy in the room was as palpable as the energy around Hennessy, if less endearingly humane and community oriented. An odor of dead fish permeated the space. It was nausea inducing, as was the way Young berated her dancers (who were dressed as sailors) for everything that was going “wrong.” But oh how spectators do enjoy the idea that something dangerous, unscripted, or embarrassing might actually transpire. Parts of me actually do admire this woman, an individual who appears free of social responsibility and anxiety, who can and will flop around in a giant fish tail, gnaw on smelly raw fish, let her heavy breasts hang (what must be painfully) free, and still remain so empowered. Still, I find it impossible to like her.

And clearly she prefers it that way: her on-stage persona practically begs for reproach. Others who presented themselves as halfway sincere versions of themselves tried harder to endear the audience to them-playing-them. Miguel Gutierrez’s solo, Heavens What Have I Done, starts as a biographical lecture-performance evocative of French intellectual non-dance from the 1990s, but he quickly lets the piece transform into aggressively sensationalistic, heavily layered physical theater, complete with opera singing and tap dancing. He draws us in, creating a false sense of closeness with overly intimate details about his life—unpacking a suitcase to reveal his sexual recovery book, yoga blocks, and research materials for a future project. And he explains how he doesn’t get the respect he feels he deserves, expressing the frustrations of a mid-career artist who has earned an enormous amount of success, but still feels marginalized.

Through language, including intimate confessions, Gutierrez constructs an institutional and cultural critique. It’s always such a fine line to walk when the subject is ostensibly “me, me, me,” and although we know by now that the personal is political, sometimes the personal seems like it’s just exercising the ego. And yet, it’s still a brave act to get up on stage and reveal oneself with the intention of making art that lives outside of the old rules of dance. That Tarek Halaby titled his performance, “An attempt to understand my socio-political disposition through artistic research on personal identity in relationship to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Part One,” makes clear his intentions—the key words here are research and identity.


Keith Hennessy in Crotch at Abrons Arts Center during the American Realness Festival. Photo by Ian Douglas, courtesy tbspMGMT.
Yes, it matters that Halaby has a political message in this piece. But since he takes a straightforward human rights advocacy position, his formal decisions are more thought provoking. He attempts to make us feel compassion for Palestinians by placing us, at least in our imagination, in positions where we can relate to what it feels like to be them. He wants us to see Palestinians as individual human beings, and so he presents himself as aligned with their struggle: Palestinian himself, utterly, overly relatable. There is nothing polished and performer-like about his timid, charming, but self-deprecating persona (including the fact that he is never entirely believable). That we can’t actually relate to what the Palestinians go through is also clear and merges (not accidentally) to a personal thread running through the piece—his failure to actually make a dance. He’s sophisticated enough not to actually mean he’s failed: the dance he’s made is entirely on trend. Notably, however, Halaby does skip the formalized movement completely, instead interspersing his speech with faintly physicalized enactments of his research, including things he read in books, stories he heard, and personal experiences.

That Halaby is inspired by Gutierrez’s work is no secret. He discusses his relationship with the seasoned choreographer within the first few moments of his monologue, and doesn’t seem to feel the need to distance himself from this influence. He puts himself in a difficult position by doing so, because a retrospective comparison with Gutierrez’s finely calibrated manipulation of the crowd deflates the memory of Halaby’s attempt. His talk of dancing for Gutierrez is, however, effective as a nod (intentional or no) to his own “failure” to make a dance. It is also a helpful reminder that many of the American Realness artists are communicating regularly with each other; as a community, they are working with new techniques for conveying certain choreographic ideas that have become more important to them conceptually than body-based craft alone.

In a co-production with Performance Space 122’s COIL festival, American Realness also included THEM, a piece by the choreographer Ishmael Houston-Jones, composer Chris Cochrane, and writer Dennis Cooper, which premiered in 1986 and was revived this fall. There is an unusual urgency in this piece, which is performed by the three artists who conceived it as well as a new group of young male dancers. The subject here—interactions between young gay men—thrums with undertones of street life, rejection, sickness, and trauma. The setting, made clear from the way the dancers dressed to the words Cooper spoke into the microphone, is a time and place where sexual interactions, especially in the gay community, held more danger, a greater tinge of death. Perhaps that’s what wrestling the dead goat on a dirty mattress was about. It was the single most disturbing and morally questionable animal interaction I’ve ever seen on stage, yet there was a certain beauty and necessity about the act. It was desperate and tender in a way that could never translate outside of the context of the piece.

THEM proves that live works can’t be bottled and preserved for eternity. The piece has changed since 1986: the audience is broader, the subject matter references history rather than emergency, the bodies cast in the work are older (in the case of Houston-Jones), and newer (in the case of the young dancers). Live works change; they continue to grow and age the way humans do. If it’s performance unencumbered by traditional conventions—experimental, subversive—then what it is today, it probably won’t be the next time you see it. And there’s something quite beautiful in that idea alone: that there is nothing but the present, replete with glorious failure and the endless potential to do it wrong all over again.

Read original article in the Rail Here

Sarah Michelson's Devotion / Review on Artcritical.com

In Devotion, Sarah Michelson casts two male actors—James Tyson and Jim Fletcher of the New York City Players—to dance alongside Rebecca Warner, Non Griffiths, Nicole Mannarino and Eleanor Hullihan. Griffiths, now 14-years-old, started dancing for the eminent downtown choreographer when she only 9; Michelson has explored, in the past, ideas about authorship and virtuosity through the “naïve bodies” of preteen girls. In Devotion, which is an epic two-hour, aggressively physical ballet inspired by a piece of text by Richard Maxwell, she creates movements in which highly trained female bodies interact with the literal interpretation and visible exhaustion of male partners. All are put through enormously athletic, relentlessly repeating movement sequences. Tearing apart and re-combining components of ballet with outsized yoga poses and substantial references to Twyla Tharp’s In The Upper Room (including the piece’s Phillip Glass score), Michelson meets the religious content of Maxwell’s text with pure dance—movement riding the line between possible and not.

Michelson herself does not appear onstage in person, but is the subject, with Maxwell, of luminescent portraits by TM Davy that hang high along The Kitchen’s black walls. When I first entered the Chelsea space—which was rotated lengthwise with the high tapered seating removed, fewer but longer rows of chairs lined up against the side wall—the images emerging from pure black background seemed alive, as if the hanging canvases were windows through which one actually saw human beings posed in stillness. Michelson’s voice was also present. It piped into the space over the speakers—alternating with or accompanying musician Pete Drungle’s loud, atmospheric score—as Warner, playing the Narrator, physicalized Maxwell’s personal, colloquial version of the Old and New Testament.

Warner worked her way around the room with a commanding yet neutral presence. She lunged forward with her upper spine arched and arms outstretched as if they might reach out of even her own skin, tilted from the waist, and spun with one or two arms out. Meanwhile, Michelson read: “Eve settles down and says plainly: We really are simple things. Simple, fearful things.” She continued, “Mary holding babe in the oblivion of no sleep. Let this be ordinary. Let it be away from the current. Let her have her time with her child. Mary, Jesus.” Fletcher played the physically demanding role of Adam—during the second hour he was literally running around the space, catching the Eve as she threw her body repeatedly into his arms. Tyson was Jesus opposite Girffiths’ Mary.

Her white blond hair tied tightly back against nearly translucent young skin, Griffiths has a certain thin frailty that created palpable tension each time she quivered after landing a sharp, reductionist leap. Despite this, she seemed to have enough determination and devotion to the material or some idea of dance and performance, to push through. She was also the perfectly cast Virgin Mother for this work; when she approached Tyson’s figure, the partnering seemed both accidental and necessary for her survival. She almost seemed as if she might fall without him, and yet she shined in a way his Jesus did not, and was not supposed to.

Griffiths changed shoes in front of the audience from sneakers into black dance shoes, and without preciousness or over-intellectualizing, it was clear that this was also a dance about dance: a play with derivative forms reaching back into history yet breaking through convention all the same. Everything, it seems in this piece, is on the line, yet the humans making it are also so clearly real: a rigorous execution of craft that manages not to mask the dancers’ bodies with technique.

Read the originally published article on Artcritical Here