8″x8″; cut paper, acetate; 2019. Courtesy of the artist.
FROM KOLAJ 30
A work of fiction by Clive Knights
The story begins:
The swamp can be found not far beyond the city walls. It is forbidden territory, ominous and threatening, shrouded by a thick forest at the foot of a mountain that flexes its several peaks like great buttresses towards the vault of the sky. The inhabitants of the city have protected themselves from its perils by constructing an artificial environment in which to dwell, cast in the brittle formations of logic and technique, and garrisoned by the allied forces of Empiricism and Intellectualism; an introverted city with no prospect, no perception of an horizon; a city that lives in fear of the swamp, the forest, the mountain and the sky; a city called “Objectivity”.
The work of fiction is a meditation on art’s relationship to power, or more precisely, the writing is a commentary on how artists negotiate social structures.
As editorial policy, Kolaj Magazine neither reprints previously published material nor do we publish fiction. The decision to make an exception in this case was informed by the events of 2020; the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 presidential election in the United States; the looming Brexit in the United Kingdom; and the ongoing social and political crises in Hong Kong, Chile, Venezuela, and Brazil. Knights’ story reminds us that fiction, at times, can speak to a greater truth.
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Based in Portland, Oregon, Clive Knights is a collage artist and printmaker, as well as a Professor of Architecture and the Director of the School of Architecture at Portland State University. For over three decades, he has deployed collage techniques in his teaching as a way of teasing out imaginary settings with depth and character from the flatness of a sheet of paper. He has exhibited his collages, monotypes and architectural drawings internationally since inclusion in the 1985 Venice Biennale. National venues have included the Tacoma Museum of Art and participation in juried group shows at galleries and art centers across sixteen states. His article, “Stranger at the Studio Table”, about architecture and collage was published in Kolaj #17. His work was also included in Collage Artist Trading Cards, Pack 5, Cut Me Up #2, and Oltre Collage Fanzine #3. In 1992, Clive Knights published “The City of Objectivity” in Scroope (no. 4, 1992), the annual architecture journal of the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge. Learn more at www.cliveknights.com.