BJP: Can you explain the title?
MM: I think of the work as poetry. The title is a metaphor. It feels sort of vulgar to undress it! I will say that you could just as easily replace the words ‘Heaven’ and ‘Prison’ with any number of things: ‘Love is a Prison’; ‘Intimacy is a Prison’; ‘Heaven is a place-that-feels-suffocating’. But, if you like being choked, would that be so bad?
I am acting facetious of course, but I do think the work begs some questions: To whom does ‘heaven’ belong? And what constitutes a ‘heaven’ or a ‘prison’? The work would suggest that they are two sides of the same coin. Hence, my interest in depicting BDSM, a fetishistic form of sex that is essentially about pain, submission, and bondage as vehicles towards ecstasy and ultimately transcendence.
The whole thing is actually very Christian!
BJP: Why did you select Southern California’s high desert as the location for the work? How does the landscape affect and shape the series?
MM: I was born and raised on the high desert periphery of Los Angeles, which is where I made all the photographs. This place is very personal to me; my relationship with it is decades-long. I hope the care I’ve taken in representing it is suggestive of this affinity.
People often mischaracterise the desert as desolate, empty, and blank, especially outsiders. In actuality, it’s none of those things. By all appearances it is austere, and beautifully so, but it’s also very rich. Perhaps that’s one of the things I find so attractive about it? It’s a landscape that keeps its cards close.
In the book, the landscape exists two-fold. It provides as a stage on which these acts take place, and acts as a third-party to the intimacy I’m describing, which is why the photographs rarely confer a horizon. It’s an aesthetic decision but it’s also a psychological one. It forces a claustrophobic intimacy with the terrestrial while paradoxically suggesting that this landscape extends infinitely into a purgatorial or Edenesque otherworld — another reason why the desert landscape was so crucial. If it was overgrown, lush greenery, the landscape would lack important equivocality; it would read exclusively as utopic.
BJP: Would you say you present bodies as landscapes and landscapes as bodies in both this series and throughout your work? If so, what is the significance of this approach?
MM: Yes and no. As an artist, I’m interested in confusing and complicating all kinds of distinctions. On an existential and even cellular level, we are all constantly on the precipice of becoming another thing. I’m interested in formal and figurative flux. It’s about transformation.
In Heaven, that happens more specifically through the synonymous description of landscape and body because they happen to be the literal subjects of the book. I mentioned earlier that I wanted the landscape to feel like a third-party to this intimacy. Anthropomorphising it and making it more human was a strategy for doing that, and vice-versa. I wanted to make legible our relationship to the natural environment; how the landscape inscribes upon and is inscribed by our histories, traumas, intimacies, and subjectivities. But there are also moments in which the landscape in the book resembles waves or water. An arid landscape momentarily becomes a fluid one.
So, in Heaven, there is a pronounced focus on landscape and body. But, no, in terms of my broader art practice, it’s not exclusively a body-landscape quandary. I’m broadly interested in producing metaphor and suggesting transcendence: of language, of the body, of surface, of the literal, even of the image. I always want the photographs to point beyond the confines of the frame and towards something greater. I recently heard someone in a Quaker meeting refer to this as “the burning one-ness binding everything”. That sounds about right.
BJP: In the essay that accompanies the book Garth Greenwell writes: “Much of the commercial pornography produced today intends to elicit a singular response—that, like propaganda, it wants us to feel a single thing. Interesting art, art that has enduring force, never wants us to feel a single thing … McKnight’s photographs resolutely deny us a singular response.” This is such an interesting point, and I wanted to ask if this was your intention: did you set out to create a series that would complicate viewers’ responses to the image of two men having sex, and, if so, why?
MM: Yes, it is my intention. I’d also like to add that I think most photography — even art for that matter — wants to elicit a singular response, typically to the detriment of author and audience. It’s a pervasive contemporary attitude toward imaging that encourages mindless production and consumption rather than curious, critical or meaningful engagement. It brings to mind Moholy-Nagy, who very presciently claimed that photography would be the lingua franca of modernity. I regret that he was right. I’m not interested in photographs superseding language. I’m compelled by the medium’s capacity to give form to those things that exist outside of it.
To bring it back to Garth, because he is so brilliant, we gave a talk together some months ago in which he said of his writing that it was “a tool for thinking, not a container for thought”. I couldn’t agree more. As such, I don’t have a roadmap to offer for interpreting this work. Garth also wrote very recently in The Guardian that “sex is a crucible of humanness,” a statement that he pre-empted by discussing how sex is often the circumstance in which we are paradoxically at our most vulnerable, performative, generous, selfish, physical, and metaphysical. Similarly, I have a desire to highlight some of these contradictions and subsequently what it means to be human. I am arguing for sex as both meaningful and meaning-making. It’s an uphill battle but I think the pictures help.