John Knight

Entering Greene Naftali’s cavernous Chelsea space for this exhibition feels, in a word, underwhelming. The viewer is greeted by a large corporate font declaring AUTOTYPES—the first word of the show’s title—and a vitrined stack of gold-rimmed china plates (all works 2011). There is an inky square on the top plate’s surface, but those below remain hidden. A walk-through of the two rear galleries reveals plate after plate, mounted at eye level, each adorned with a similar black mass: Some look like aerial shots of military installations, others microchips, and a few ambiguous hieroglyphics. These dishes stir up associations with the early-modern bourgeois, a hybrid of fancy dinnerware and Bauhaus design. Is John Knight making a new line for the MoMA store?

Hardly. Further inspection (and an assist from the project description) reveals that each of these indeterminate little buildings is a bird’s-eye plan of a new addition to an art museum, of the sort that has cropped up in every cultural-capital–hungry global city––from Bilbao down the line––served up for the delectation of anyone with tourist dollars. The plates in the front room depict, in fact, the proliferating iterations of the Guggenheim itself. In his work, Knight has long analyzed the ways that art, power, and the built environment interlink. Here, his deflationary détournements of spectacle-style master plans mingle precious subtlety with trenchant acidity, quietly suggesting new directions for serial painting and assisted readymades. It won’t fool you twice.