John Knight

For more than four decades, the elusive but influential Los Angeles-based artist JohnKnight has developed a practice of site specificity that tests both architectural and ideologicalboundaries of the museum, gallery, and public sphere. Knight's works defy notions of stylisticcoherence, even, at times, of instant recognizability. Grounded in a sustained method of inhabitingthe material, discursive and economic conditions of varied sites, his works systematically challengenotions of object, sign, context, authorship, and value, and they confront audiences not only withmailers, posters, and journals but also with carpenter levels, commemorative plates, deck chairs,bicycle bells, flower arrangements, and credit cards. This volume offers essays and interviews thattrace the critical thinking on Knight, discussing the artist's trajectory from 1969 to 2011. Thesetexts, by such prominent figures as Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Anne Rorimer, Alexander Alberro, andBirgit Pelzer, offer close readings of Knight's pivotal projects in situ while also considering themin terms of such art-historical paradigms as the readymade, the anti-aesthetic, institutionalcritique, and the relationship between art- and design as well as corporate culture at large. Thebook provides the first collection of these often hard-to-find texts on Knight and will serve as anessential guide for further consideration of his oeuvre.

Andre Rottmann is a Research Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of Art History at Freie Universitat, Berlin.