Mark McKnight’s Heaven Is a Prison (2020)

Garth GREENWELL

(Republished with author permission)

I’ve been thinking and writing about Mark McKnight’s work for many months now, but each time I turn to it I find myself confronted by the questions that bewildered me on first acquaintance. Novel-writing and photography have a storied alliance, from Zola to Sebald and Teju Cole, but while art photography had intrigued me it had never, until I was asked to write on McKnight’s work, affected me so profoundly; it had never imposed itself with such existential urgency or so powerfully intersected with my own endeavors in art-making. My fascination with McKnight has led to an education in the history of his medium, and especially in the modernist masters whose aesthetics he inherits, transgresses, and transforms. Some of my questions, I know, reflect my innocence of the medium. How is it possible for an art to be at once so bound to its subject matter, so faithful in the literal representation of particular reality, and yet so prone to metaphor and abstraction? How can what is finally a mechanical process feel so steeped in subjectivity? These are naïve questions but also ones that haunt the medium; sophistication doesn’t resolve them so much as, in a kind of polite conspiracy, discreetly let them drop. Other irresolvable questions—other sources of wonder—are more particular to McKnight’s work. How can these images be so cold and so hot at once, so restrained and mastered and also so utterly unbridled? How can they be so expressive of both abjection and exuberance? How can they seem—entirely independent of their subject matter—so filthy and so clean? Most profoundly: how can images that reject so many of the usual sources of affect— psychological narrative, social context, the expressivity of the human face—nevertheless be so saturated with affect, so nearly operatic in register? My initial, immediate sense of the work has not faded with familiarity. Its achievement lies in holding these contraries not in stasis but in a kind of vibrating suspension, and this suspension conveys the sense of inexhaustibility, the bottomlessness necessary in all art that commands enduring attention.

Anyone familiar with McKnight’s earlier work will see continuities in Heaven Is a Prison: the gorgeous, exquisitely modulated black and white photographs shot in sometimes punishing natural light, often exposed and printed so that details are obscured and shadows attain a kind of abyssal black, at once inviting and frustrating our curiosity; the dramatic use of the desert landscapes of the American West; the sensual depiction, sometimes tender, sometimes a little cruel— often both of these things at once—of bodies that are often excluded from the canons of sensuality in art; everywhere, a commitment to beauty, though beauty of a challenging, even an adversarial kind. But these new photographs also mark a significant departure. Never has his subject matter been so assertive as in these photos of sex portrayed with pornographic explicitness; never has the style been so sustainedly lyrical in individual photographs or so ambitious in its use of sequence, the way images are arranged and counterpointed with white space, with visual silence, to generate meaning through poetic effects of juxtaposition, rhyme, and refrain.

To begin with subject matter. I’ve argued before that sex is a kind of crucible of humanness and therefore has a particular usefulness in art. What I mean by this is that sex exerts a pressure on us that brings to the fore—that makes inescapable—the set of interlocked contradictions that seem to me distinctive of the human. We might think of these in terms of polarities, of light and shadow, to suggest one of McKnight’s visual equivalents, or affirmation and negation. Thus sex is an arena of affirmative agency (I grasp, I open, I plunge) but also of subjection (I am grasped, opened, engulfed); thus in sex I seek pleasure, but also something that exceeds or counterpoints pleasure, a pleasure that is always proximate to pain (“pleasure and pain are inseparable companions,” writes Simone Weil); thus in sex I seek communion with another even as I chase an experience that, at least for a moment, obliterates all sense of self and other in what the French call “the little death.” For gay men who came of age in the AIDS era, the intrication of Eros and Thanatos, the impulse to life and the death drive, is much more than a Freudian abstraction. All of these dynamics are heightened, made explicit and performative, in the kind of sadomasochistic sex McKnight takes as his subject in these photos, in which the shifting lines of power active in any sexual encounter are literalized in chains, the effacement of self all sex risks theatricalized in acts of degradation. The photographs are remarkable for their voraciousness, their desire to show us everything, often from multiple perspectives and to very different effects. A man bound by chains eating another man’s ass is not the same act, these photos have taught me, when the figures are framed against a slanted horizon.

The photographs are pornographic, if by that word we mean sexually explicit, hiding nothing from view. (In fact these photos hide many things from us—but not genitalia, not penetration, not the exchange of fluids.) The problem with that endlessly elastic word is that no one can ever be sure what it means. When used in a pejorative way about representations of sex in art it is often a symptom of puritanism, a kind of tepid morality, irrelevant to serious judgment. (Surely it is ridiculous to suggest that so huge and central a territory of human life and feeling is somehow prohibited to art.) But there is another way of using the term that conveys a more plausible criterion, as Roland Barthes does when he defines the “erotic,” which he approves, as “a pornographic that has been disturbed, fissured.” It seems fair enough to say of much of the commercial pornography produced today that it 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. This is what Barthes suggests, I think, in his image of fissures: that something has troubled a monolithic response, that affect has been interestingly fractured and multiplied.

McKnight’s photographs resolutely deny us a singular response. This isn’t at all to say that they aren’t sexy: turning a viewer on is a powerful effect, and these photographs achieve it. But even at their sexiest they are full of surprises; having aroused us, they divert arousal’s rush to satisfaction. In what is to me the sexiest, the most arousing photograph (every viewer will have their own), a man lies on his back, framed by the legs of his lover standing before him. I’m surprised to be aroused by this image: the men aren’t touching each other, the recumbent man’s cock is soft. Perhaps it’s the face I find so sexy, with its inscrutable expression, a mixture of mastery and fondness—or what I read as mastery and fondness, it’s impossible to be sure. McKnight’s photographs have never shown faces before; facelessness has been one of their dominant effects, in images of torsos cropped at the neck, or men lying face down on concrete, or with their faces obscured behind painted glass. Even here the faces are only ever partial, often framed so as to render ambiguous any clear reading of affect.

I am seduced by this photograph, but its seduction troubles or distracts me from arousal.

Maybe it is true of all art, or all serious art, that abstraction tugs at representation, the particular always yearning toward the mythic or archetypal. (Barthes sees this as a facet of desire itself, always sacrificing “the image to the Image-repertoire”; so does Socrates, in Diotima’s ladder of desire in the Symposium.) Certainly the most extraordinary element of McKnight’s image is abstract: its geometry, the standing man’s legs dividing the image into a central rough triangle and two echoing inverted triangles on either side. (Is it this geometry that makes it sexy? Anne Carson says of Sappho that she “seems less interested in these characters as individuals than in the geometric shapes they form”; this is true too in some of McKnight’s photographs.) As in all of McKnight’s work there is an exquisite play of textures, grass against skin against hair against metal. From other photographs I recognize the recumbent man as the dominant of the pair, and the next page will confirm that he is in fact holding the chains, not bound by them, but in this individual image that isn’t clear. His posture might be domineering or prone, and the shadow chains that frame his cock suggest—shadows do a great deal of work in many of these photos— another kind of bondage. Another suggestion of submission: the man’s eyes, which would allow us to read his expression more surely, are blocked from view by his partner’s balls, a suggestion of submission present not in the scene but in the photograph. In all of these ways, the photo presents a more complicated power dynamic than the cartoonish dominance and submission a less nuanced portrayal of S/M’s power theatrics might convey. The photo is richly, complexly psychological; it is, I’m tempted to say, novelistic. And so I have forgotten my arousal—or not forgotten it; it has become one among many responses, which taken together are too complex to be called anything other than properly aesthetic.

Many of these photographs move me in ways I have difficulty explaining. Why is it that the images that strike me as genuinely filthy are not of bodies at all, but of the weathered trunk of a fallen tree, its jagged end suggesting an orifice blown open? (Also the mouth of a cave, also descent, also initiation.) Why is it that the photograph that is most explicit, most “hard-core” in its portrayal of the sexual body—the single image of anal penetration—of all the pictures in this book seems to me the most chaste? Is it because the faces are entirely obscured, one body cropped at the torso and the other turned away from us? (But porn often occludes faces without seeming chaste.) McKnight often rhymes organic and inorganic surfaces, so that, in an earlier project, craters evoke orifices, and an image of a torn bag of asphalt is titled “Flesh.” What is it about this image of penetration that makes these bodies seem de-fleshed, that suggests to me not flesh but metal or stone? (It puts me in mind of the social realist monuments that fill Eastern European capitals.) This may be the most profound perversion McKnight’s work explores: that of transforming flesh into inorganic matter, as in this photograph of penetration, and of investing matter with the subjectivity of flesh, as in his orifice tree. The penetration image is even more stark in its geometry than the photograph of bondage discussed earlier, with the angle of the bottom’s legs echoed not just by the legs of the man fucking him but by the thumb and forefinger of each of that man’s hands, and by the angle between the index and middle fingers of his own hand, pulling his balls out of the way. (The furrows of flesh this creates, which rhyme with the indentations in his thighs, interrupt the chastity I feel in the rest of the image, and are the source of the photo’s greatest heat.) The site of penetration isn’t the center of the photograph, as it would be in an image meant merely to arouse us; it forms instead a fourth point with the three hands, less the focus of the photograph than an element necessary to complete a design.

In a culture that has radically privileged sex as a site of risk and trauma and radically de-privileged it as a site of meaning, it may seem dissonant to suggest that these photographs are always invested in the sacred. But in fact this is the most intriguing of those interlocked contradictions that make sex so revelatory of the human: that an act that places us so resolutely in our animal bodies also provides us with our least dismissible experience of something that exceeds them. Sex is the source of all our metaphysics, and sadomasochistic sex aims not just at transgression but transformation; it is an affirmation, as Michel Foucault writes, both of “limited being” and of “the limitlessness into which it leaps.” Ascesis is a technology productive of pleasure as well as revelation, and the self-shattering sought in sadomasochistic sex is analogous to, may indeed be identical with, what W.H. Auden calls “the hermit’s carnal ecstasy,” mystical divine union. McKnight titled an earlier series of photographs “Decreation,” after Simone Weil’s concept of the unmaking of the self necessary for creating an empty space for God to enter. The idea that by deemphasizing or annulling certain aspects of reality one enables the perception of new aspects is one reading of the deliberately eccentric exposure and printing techniques McKnight uses, importantly violating the precepts of the modernist aesthetic that informs much of his work. The idea of decreation is implicated in the odd sense of substantiality he gives to shadows, and the dramatic way in which he gives shadow a protagonist’s role. So, in the haunting image used on the cover of Heaven Is a Prison, a man’s shadow (underexposed and over-printed to the absolute, abyssal black McKnight uses to such effect) falls between the splayed legs of his lover, an image of simultaneous, ineluctable presence and absence. In interviews, McKnight has quoted Simone Weil’s desire “to see a landscape as it is when I am not there,” her longing for a perfection of beauty that will arise from the very fact of her absence. This is one source of the weird, affecting hauntedness that sometimes characterizes McKnight’s landscapes, as when one turns from a photograph of men embracing to one of a depopulated field.

Central to Weil’s idea of decreation—central to both mystic and sadomasochistic ascesis—is the degradation or humiliation of the self. (These photos remind us of the etymology of humiliation: to be brought close to the soil.) Perhaps the photos in this book that will be seen as most transgressive are those that show a man first begging for and then being covered with another man’s urine. Writing about gay male erotic piss play, and about “urine as an aesthetic medium,” the queer theorist Tim Dean argues that “men who are drinking other men’s piss … are experiencing sustenance, not humiliation.” McKnight’s photos endorse this, I think: in the context of the desert, in punishing sun, piss might indeed be experienced as sustenance, even of salvation. So the central image in this sequence, which is among the most lyrical of McKnight’s photos, is at once remorselessly literal and immediately figurative: we see a man pissing; we see a fountain in the desert. (This is also the single shot in which we see fluid exiting a penis, the closest we come to a money shot, and so it carries a sense as well of the ecstatic, of the boundaries of the body faltering and becoming porous.) But this doesn’t undo, as Dean seems to suggest it does, the abjection that is a necessary part of the thrill of being pissed on, that degradation of the self that contributes to the self-shattering the postulant seeks. McKnight’s photographs commemorate a transvaluation, I think, by which waste is turned into something precious, a gift, but this transvaluation is never stable; instead, the power of the images comes from their embrace of vacillation. What the photographs dramatize is both humiliation and exaltation, baptism and ordeal, the one guaranteed by the other. The composition of the final photo in the sequence recalls the image of bondage discussed earlier, with one man framed by the legs of another, and again the face is partially obscured, making the expression unreadable. Does that face, running with urine, show relief or endurance, ecstasy or disgust? We can’t know, and so it is any of these things, or all of them. This ambiguity is suggested as well by the extraordinary landscape shot that punctuates or interrupts this series, a gorgeous image of shadow across grass. Here the shadow is not abyssal, but flecked with light; the sun-lit grasses are populated by shadows. Light and shadow commingle in this image, they vacillate, a literalization of both psychology and metaphysics.

These are also political images; McKnight’s work has political force simply by its existence. By centering queer, Latinx bodies, by placing them in non-urban settings, by photographing them in a way that foregrounds beauty, McKnight pushes against prejudices in both the art world and contemporary American culture more broadly. By portraying explicit sex between men, he rejects the desexualization of queer bodies that has been the cost of mainstream acceptance in a culture that to a certain extent embraces same-sex marriage and parenting but recoils from the fact of men fucking each other. By centering bodies that are large, nonwhite, covered with hair, McKnight rejects standards of beauty that dominate both the straight and the queer worlds. And in presenting the scandal of queer abjection, McKnight complicates a too-easy, politically motivated discourse of queer optimism and pride that, as it becomes coercive, deformingly flattens the complexity of queer lives. In their portrayal of open-air fetishistic sex, these photographs challenge an idealizing, exemplary image of queer relation as consonant with conventional ideals of straight domesticity, as well as of easy notions of virtue and health. These photographs resist easy readings in all directions; they challenge all our pieties. What is most remarkable about them, however, is how free they are of any easily legible polemic; they are defiant without being didactic. McKnight does not present an argument about the beauty of these bodies or assert the value of the acts and lives he portrays; his manner of presenting them makes that beauty and value incontrovertible. The two images of the men embracing are moving because, in portraying the caretaking that is very often a part of sadomasochistic practice, they suggest a closing of the circuit of value. Value is not something bestowed upon these men by some external force; it is something they create and bestow upon each other. McKnight’s work asserts a kind of sovereignty that seems to me nearly utopic; within its frame, the world could not be otherwise. (McKnight has said that one motivation of the series is to populate the landscape of his childhood with queer bodies he wishes had been available to him, a utopic redemption of the past that is a frequent theme of queer art.)

This sovereignty is achieved by formal means; it is the sovereignty, I want to say, of beauty. There is a prejudice in current thinking about art that insists beauty is always a mystification of some more fundamental social process, a critique that would strip away the aesthetic as an important mode of experience, reducing it to a species of delusion. It seems to me that this attitude forces us into a false dilemma; one can acknowledge the importance of political and ideological aspects of artistic meaning-making without dismissing the aesthetic effects—the surplus of significance, the splendor—that distinguishes art-making as a human activity. It’s easy to make McKnight’s photographs voluble in anesthetic terms, but the aesthetic remains the primary and overwhelming source of my response to his work. I’ve argued before that McKnight’s photographs have the density of great poems, and that seems to me even more true of this most recent work, with its obsessive use of metaphor and motif. So grasses repeatedly resemble waves; a geological formation is made to mirror the furrow of a man’s back; indentations in gripped flesh chime across photos like an end rhyme across lines. Rhyme is repetition with a difference, a technique McKnight uses throughout this series, sometimes to devastating effect, as when, in the third iteration of an image of a man servicing his partner, a fly appears on his back: a memento mori, a reminder of vanitas. Something similar happens with the images of clouds, which function as a kind of refrain, their suggestions of transcendence sometimes radically troubled (though not negated) by McKnight’s day for night techniques. (Heaven is heaven, the photos say; also, heaven is a prison.)

These photographs also remind me of poems in the way that meaning is so powerfully generated by placement in a sequence, and sequence may be McKnight’s most impressive formal accomplishment in this book. The arrangement of images is not conventionally narrative: it’s clear that we are not seeing a single erotic session, not least because the landscape is transformed by season, a transformation presented achronologically. The photos are grouped into stanzaic units, which are in turn arranged to create a modulation of emotion that is almost overpowering. A common, powerful characteristic of McKnight’s photographs is a kind of claustrophobic effect achieved through tight cropping and the refusal of horizon. He seldom lets us see bodies or landscapes holistically; he sometimes troubles our sense of scale. This is true of the early photos in Heaven Is a Prison, but the sequence radically opens out, and the final group of photos includes the first in which McKnight has allowed a horizon. We have a glimpse of it, in the upper left corner of the first photo of this group; then it features in images of landscapes free of human forms; finally, bodies and a full horizon are presented together. There’s a strange, equivocal sense of triumph for me in this photograph, in its sweep and openness, an expansiveness not just of image but of affect. As is true of the book as a whole, it gives an exhilarating sense of an artist making new discoveries, developing new strengths. Even as it portrays an act that some viewers may see as degrading—a bound man eating another man’s ass—it conveys an overwhelming sense of affirmation. This is true, too, of the final image in this book, which follows this essay, in which the two men lie in a flowering field, one on top of the other. It is as if the love of these men—a love often dismissed as deviant, frivolous, unproductive, sterile, a love acted out for us in dramas of domination, submission, devotion—has resulted in this eruption of florescence; fruitless coition has borne fruit. Here too there is a piquancy of equivocation: the men are not lying faceto-face, and the photograph recalls the earlier image of a body recumbent on stone, recalls too its suggestion of sacrifice. There are no unequivocal images in McKnight’s work. And yet it seems to me a kind of blessing, this photograph, a profound vision of affirmation and communion, a sacralization of queer sex and sociality. Look closely at the men: obscured in flowers, almost hidden from view, their fingers are entwined.

Armijo McKnight’s first solo institutional exhibition, Decreation, is currently on view at The Whitney Museum of American Art from August 24, 2024 through January 5, 2025.

Contributor

Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, it was named a Best Book of 2016 by over fifty publications in nine countries, and is being translated into fourteen languages. His second book of fiction, Cleanness, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the L.D. and LaVerne Harrell Clark Fiction Prize, and France’s Prix Sade (Deuxième sélection). Cleanness was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2020, a New York Times Critics Top 10 book of the year, and a Best Book of the year by the New Yorker, TIME, NPR, the BBC, and over thirty other publications. It is being translated into eight languages. A new novel, Small Rain, is forthcoming from FSG in 2024. Greenwell is also the co-editor, with R.O. Kwon, of the anthology KINK, which appeared in February 2021, was named a New York Times Notable Book, won the inaugural Joy Award from the #MarginsBookstore Collective, and became a national bestseller. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and VICE, and he has written nonfiction for The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and Harper’s, among others. He writes regularly about literature, film, art and music for his Substack, To a Green Thought. He is the recipient of many honors for his work, including a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2021 Vursell Award for prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop, Grinnell College, the University of Mississippi, and Princeton. Greenwell currently lives in New York, where he is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at NYU.