Gordon Knox, president of the San Francisco Art Institute
Show: A group show of the most impactful works of all time
You know how you can (rarely, but wonderfully) walk into an exhibition and find a piece that stops you in your tracks? A piece that because it is so damned clear, and so damned true, and so damned important, you don’t forget it. It doesn’t happen often—but you know it when it does. So, my dream exhibition would include a handful of such revelatory insights, sublimely delivered. The anthropologist in me has those breakthrough moments emerging from the glorious chaos of how humans assemble themselves, and create the world we inhabit. The real kicker of course is when those insights, delivered by a specific piece, also empower us to radiate that sort of change forward. The key impact I am looking for is the inexpressible clarity that ideas in art can determine how we approach the world, and that through art, we have the power to change things.
My dream exhibition might include: Hans Haacke’s Mobilization and/or On Social Grease, which were revelatory to me as a college student reading social sciences; Muntadas’ File Room drove that understanding further, adding the collective power of contributions offered by participant viewers; Raqs Media Collective took the power of social examination and made it deeper, setting up time as a core element; SUPERFLEX blew my socks off, and still does; and then recently, Julio Cesare Morales’s work, so gentle and painful and sweet and terrible; and most recently, work by the collective Postcommodity would need to be included—perhaps their Repellent Fence (2015), a project that united every group in the highly contested war zone of the Mexican/Arizona border for 36 glorious hours.