On Mark Mc Knights 'Icons and Allegories' a response by Phil King

Motley is the only wear. --Shakespeare: As You Like It, ii. 7.

The show is curated by an artist, the photographer Mark McKnight, and proposes that the artists chosen are engaged in some forms of role play and tactical activity. The underlying purpose of the exhibition is carnivalesque, a heterogeneous foolishness is allowed a space. It has long been a fascination that in medieval times the grotesque carnival mostly took place right up close to the religious institutions, that its subversive play had a defined place, and like the Cathedral gargoyles , a role. The duality of the darkly comic and the classical rationality of light, each revealing the other. What illuminating power does the purpose on display at 'Sight School' labour under? As defined in the press release it is a dominant power that needs to be eluded, a power that has certain expectations, that has a clear direction and way of proceeding. The artwork on display is put forward as trying to escape this all powerful light by using accident, inadvertence, bemusement, perversity, morbidity and the refusal of intention. This is a power whose completeness is challenged by the fact that some of the works implications are reported as incomplete and undecidable. The purpose is impressively ambitious. It shows escape from the signifier by a variety of displayed tactics, some of the images have a feeling of dodgy sexual secrets brought to light others actually simply foreground a game of light and shadow. The desire to flee any dominant interpretation is a longing that itself plays an accepted role , becomes a drollery or perversion that is itself part of a long established dualism . Good and Evil. Sunshine and shadow. Is this black and white consideration of the world actually a kind of eternal yin yang story? Does it participate in what is becoming a newly dominant philosophical paradigm leaving European classicism behind. Thinking is generally brought up to a standstill faced with this different kind of power, and the exhibition of black and white clichs, (can you still buy black and white film?) the indeterminacy and the arcane qualities, begin to speak of a fatalistic orientation, a (in the terms of classical western certainties) bracing and thorough nihilism which, as someone settling in the

Bay Area from the UK, I value as a reassuring corrective to the dominantly positive and clear sighted axiomatic here . I am not sure if the individual pieces in the show in themselves embody this philosophical strategy, it is a strategy which doesn't allow a distanced perspective from which to judge but demands involvement and a certain surrender. I know from a friends strong reaction to a perceived elitist obscurantism that he felt defined the show, (he had a sense of an exclusive 'club' at work ), that something akin to an obtusely challenging avant garde has returned with the exhibitions proposal. While personally I am comfortable participating in the silence of its consensus baiting potential, I struggled to find an adequate response to my friends hostility. I'm left grasping for notions adequate to the immanence of 'Eastern' philosophies here in California, finding the place somehow balanced on an edge of the 'Western' world and worry whether I am right in understanding this show as a 'yin/yang' machine. I remain uncertain. My usual habit would be to turn back to the work itself so as to confirm my hunch but for some reason that doesn't help here, and this fact is the hook that has caught me struggling with the curators underlying purpose. I know that there can be a crushing pragmatism at work here in the USA and can see that many of the artworks elude it effectively. There is certainly an acute and distracting professionalism evident but that is but part of the story, this is an artists show and it means it. There is the liberating intuition that something rigorous is happening here and that an alternative and difficult context for thinking about art is what is at stake . With the collapse of the anarchic energy of a supercharged and confused art market it falls to artists themselves to generate an escape from the limitations of dominant state thinking and assumptions in whatever way they can. I must tell my friend that there are worse things than feeling a fool. With thanks to all concerned, Phil King.
During the reign of Elizabeth I, motley served the important purpose of keeping the fool outside the social hierarchy and therefore not subject to class distinction. Since the fool was outside the dress laws (sumptuary Wikkepedia.

law), the fool was able to speak more freely.