NEHMA | Collection

John Knight

American, b. 1945

Doree
1971

Gelatin silver prints
14.875 x 12.75 x 1 in.
Gift of the Kathryn C. Wanlass Foundation
2009.103

John Knight is one of the most challenging of the conceptually oriented artists to emerge in 1970s Los Angeles. This was a period when college-level art education was subjected to a powerful critique. The prevailing model of the “teaching artist” presumed a tension between the roles of professional artist and educator that invariably privileged the former over the latter. The countermodel, pioneered by Knight and his colleague Michael Asher, reconceived the site of art education, making the traditional classroom studio into an intensely focused seminar environment, where art teaching and art making were subjected to a relentless examination that would have a lasting effect on both. In so doing, they helped de ne the practice of what would come to be known as institutional critique.

Untitled (Doree) is a product of this moment and a rare example of Knight’s early work. It consists of eight black-and-white photographs depicting fellow artist Doree Dunlap after she had undergone a tooth extraction. The individual images are so straightforward they might be mistaken for documentary evidence, except that they are arranged in a counterfactual sequence: the swelling in Dunlap’s chin first grows and then diminishes when the photographs are read from left to right. The result is strangely compelling and at least a little humorous, despite Dunlap’s likely discomfort.

Conceptualism of this sort was a staple of Los Angeles art in the 1970s. Knight’s distinction was to recognize the inflationary potential latent in the genre of multiple and sequential photographs and to develop this insight into a highly influential body of work that dispersed itself outward, engaging with different mediums, sites, institutions, and publications. Untitled (Doree) stands prominently at the head of this line.

Tom Jimmerson

Keywords
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This object has the following keywords:

face, portrait, teeth, woman