Artists Space

Artists Space Dialogues:
John Knight and Bettina Funcke

Conversation
April 13, 2016, 7pm

One of the defining characteristics of Artists Space’s work is dialogue: dialogue between artists, writers, scholars, theorists and our audiences.

Artists Space Dialogues takes the simple format of a public conversation between two people. Every month renowned art historian Bettina Funcke will talk with an influential figure in the field of contemporary art and visual culture, investigating their work and thinking, their histories, trajectories, and processes.

The façade of a large, stone museum. A cobblestone, roundabout path snakes in front of the museum, with a series of bushes and greenery planted in the middle of the roundabout.
John Knight, The Right to Be Lazy, 2008. Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin. [The façade of a large, stone museum. A cobblestone, roundabout path snakes in front of the museum, with a series of bushes and greenery planted in the middle of the roundabout.]

Artist John Knight’s biography states that he “lives in Los Angeles and works in-situ.” Since the late 1960s his work has been grounded in an address of site, particularly articulating the ideological and architectural parameters of the museum, gallery and public sphere. In this regard, his work can be seen to extend from the critical address of spatial concerns raised by Minimalism, while taking on diverse forms of intervention through publications, commodities, graphics and architecture. Through such activation and occupation of material, discursive and economic conditions, Knight interrogates the operations of power within art, design and institutionalism.

Recent exhibitions by John Knight include: Redcat, Los Angeles, (2016); Greene Naftali, New York (2015); Art Institute of Chicago (2015); and Portikus, Frankfurt (2013). Knight was also included in the Whitney Biennial 2012 curated by Jay Sanders and Elisabeth Sussman.