User:Bipandboppop/sandbox9

Beauty
“Early on, I had a degree of shame around my desire to make things beautiful. “Beauty” and “beautiful” are bad words when you’re a 22-year-old art student. Now, though, I see beauty as a defiant position to take in what can feel like an increasingly cynical and ugly world. Also, beauty has historically been defined in terms of Eurocentric cultural standards. As a teenager, as a student in community college, and in art school, I was subjected to a canon of art history that did not mirror my racial identity, my physique, my sexuality, my desires. Up until really recently, it felt like all of the same, somewhat oppressive Eurocentric cultural standards around beauty were largely mirrored by mainstream gay and queer culture. I make what I make because it’s what I want to see, and I think that a byproduct of what I’m doing is problematizing certain histories or pointing at the embarrassingly narrow scope of art history. But that’s happening by way of my carving out a space for something else, which is really just something of my own. How we use beauty, what we insist is beautiful, is ultimately a reflection of our ethics, character, and values. Beauty is political. I guess I have a tendency to call things I appreciate “beautiful,” even if they’re conventionally not. And maybe that’s the place from which I’m always working. Maybe naming beauty for me is not just an act of defiance or opposition, but also a form of gratitude. It’s a reason to get up in the morning, to go make pictures and assign beauty through the act of seeing.” – Mark McKnight, Interview Magazine https://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/cleaness-garth-greenwell-interviews-mark-mcknight-about-his-daring-

Desire
These photographs are an illustrated record of my desire. There are no bodies I would rather look at than the ones I’m depicting. It’s not about bravery. It’s about my libido.” https://metalmagazine.eu/en/post/interview/mark-mcknight

https://www.moussemagazine.it/magazine/mark-mcknight-andrew-berardini-2021/

https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/202106/mark-mcknight-85816

Modernismm, New Topographics, and early influence
On Modernismm, New Topographics, and early influence “GREENWELL: Your work is often talked about in the tradition of the high modernists of American photography, people like Edward Weston and Minor White. That seems both true and inadequate. Are there ways that you feel you depart from that tradition? Or are there other traditions that you feel are important to your work? McKNIGHT: Modernism is a totally appropriate reference, but I do feel like it’s one of many. As much as I’ve probably internalized the vocabulary of modernism, I am also sort of rejecting it—which is probably displaced daddy issues! The language surrounding modernism was so much about these notions of things like “description,” “purity,” and “truth.” The question I’ve always had is, “Whose truth?” Those modernist pictures routinely affirm cis white heterosexual subjectivity as objectivity, to the detriment of everyone else’s experience and identity. But I’ve also done things more in keeping with Surrealism than modernism, like trying to animate objects and anthropomorphize them. Most of what I’m doing probably has to do with the unconscious influence of the very first artwork I ever fell in love with, which was Jean Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast.” I mean, he’s this large, sensitive, hairy gentleman in a gothic cathedral who is surrounded by animate objects, lurks in shadows, longs for love, and cultivates roses. He’s basically my dream boyfriend!” Interview Magazine https://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/cleaness-garth-greenwell-interviews-mark-mcknight-about-his-daring- dirty-pictures



&quot;Mark McKnight was 18 or 19 when a photographer’s work first hit him hard. “There were two shows at the Hammer Museum in LA,” he says. “I remember borrowing my parent’s car and driving into town to see them. The first was a Stephen Shore retrospective. He is probably the reason I picked up a view camera. The second exhibition was a Wolfgang Tillmans survey.” Mark mentions early in our conversation that he came out relatively late. With this in mind, his immediate reaction to Wolfgang’s work -- in all its tender and often quiet framing of male queerness -- was overwhelming. “I remember one particular photograph of three men embracing,” he says. “In the foreground, one of them is smiling softly, eyes closed. There is a profoundly tender, platonic quality to their embrace. It’s an almost brotherly depiction of homo- social intimacy that was so unfathomable in my mind up until that point that I just stood there in awe until I eventually burst into tears.” It would be some time before Mark came out, “but I carried that picture with me and found a kind of respite in it.” https://i-d.vice.com/en_uk/article/8893z5/mark-mcknight-heaven-is-a-prison-interview



I mentioned I studied at The San Francisco Art Institute; they’ve been in the news recently because they announced they are closing after 150 years, which is heartbreaking. SFAI was the first fine art photography program in the country. It was also central to F/64 and a distinctly American brand of modernist photography that celebrated ‘pure’ description and ‘accurate’ representation – ideologies that seemed held-over somehow in the form of a kind of collective worship of New Topographics. They’re also notions around photography that would later become a point of internal contention, ideas I have a desire to resist. As I mentioned, I’m interested in foregrounding the subjective, lyrical, and affective potential of the medium. Don’t get me wrong, I had an exceptional education at SFAI. Formally speaking, American Modernism and New Topographics are influential in many ways, but also, there’s something about calling description ‘pure’ that sounds fascist. I recall reading a Lewis Baltz quote when I was younger that was something like “all good art is without art or author.” I think the suggestion that one could divorce themselves of their personhood is delusional.

Feeling ‘neutral’ is the result of extreme and blind privilege. It’s almost offensive. That this ostensibly ‘objective’ approach to picture-making is frequently referred to as ‘straight’ seems apropos. It definitely reflects the lived experience of most of its practitioners. At the same time, I want to acknowledge that I love Lewis Baltz’s photographs and American Modernist photography. https://metalmagazine.eu/en/post/interview/mark-mcknight