Nick Knight exposes all

I’m sitting in Nick Knight’s office at SHOWstudio, located in a former chapel in London’s Belgravia. The fashion photographer and curator is telling me about the small 3D printed object at the far end of the table: it’s a sculpture of a pregnant woman recreating Hokusai’s The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife with a raw egg cracked over her plastic body. He has to replace the raw egg every day. Behind him, a velvet face mask and a row of prints by the fetish photographer Pierre Molinier. To our right, a wall-sized photo taken during the Parisian riots of May ‘68. And in the alcove at the end of the room, intimate photographs by Harley Weir, Hajime Sawatari and Noboyushi Araki. This is ‘SHADOW-BAN’, the latest exhibition to take over SHOWstudio. There are more paintings and sculptures on the ground floor and more on the floor below that. Many of them are NSFW.

“Censorship is something that artists have, in some way, always had to deal with,” Knight tells me. In the past, artists were told directly by their labels, publishers, and galleries what they could and couldn’t do based on what would sell. The Internet initially promised freedom, but as it’s grown, it’s since been locked down. Anyone who’s spent any time on social media is familiar with the shadow ban, a novel form of ‘community management’ that doesn’t block bad users such as spammers and trolls from contributing, but makes their contributions worthless by denying them visibility: no views, no engagement. The idea, in the tech bros’ brains, is that instead of blocking users and making them go cold turkey on dopamine hits, you gently wean them off until they change their behaviour. What exactly is going on here? Psychologists might call it “operant conditioning,” artists “a particularly insidious form of censorship,” others might say it’s an extremely effective way of saving them from your shit.

The problem today is that shadow banning is an opaque process – the gentle nudge-nudge to better behaviour wouldn’t work if the offenders knew what was happening. The effectiveness of shadow bans means that they’re handed out for minor transgressions of invisible lines. Where users claim artistic licence or freedom of expression, platforms only see violence, nudity and divisive politics. Artists are caught in a bind. The Internet offers them a larger audience than ever before in history, and a way to communicate directly with audiences, but it also shapes their work, becoming their judge, jury, and executioner. How this affects artists and their art, and what it means to test and cross boundaries, the lines between creativity and its suppression, the erotic and everyday is what interests Knight.

Knight’s own creative career started back in 1982 with the publication of his first photobook, Skinhead, itself a kind of provocative anthropological study of the notorious British subculture. His photos capture everything from their distinctive haircuts and bovver boots to their direct, unashamed racism. A major project for i-D magazine in 1985 led to him working, alongside graphic designer Peter Savile, on the 1986 catalogue for designer Yohji Yamamoto. His entry into the fashion world led to long-lasting creative partnerships with the likes of John Galliano and Alexander McQueen. Frustrated by the control placed on fashion mags by brands and advertisers, he founded SHOWstudio as a pioneering digital fashion film platform in 2000. Over the past 25 years, SHOWstudio has worked with filmmakers, writers and artists to create original images, films and texts.

Right now, the former chapel space of SHOWstudio, with its triple-height ceiling, is painted pure white with artworks of different sizes and styles scattered around: on the far wall, where the altar would have stood, is Von Wolfe’s large-scale backlit, AI image of two nude women with an uncanny resemblance to Botticelli’s Primavera. To the left is a smaller work by George Rouy, to the right, grotesque parodies of childrens’ books by Dinos Chapman. Standing in front of these, gleaming under the ceiling skylight, is Peter Saville’s white steel and white leather bondage bed – a monument to his own interests in life. All around are tables, computers and photography gear. It’s a working space as much as a leisure space.

“I don’t want to be critical of people’s galleries, but they can often feel very sterile and very much like a bank, and the art becomes a commodity, and it’s all about presenting this commodity in the most rarefied atmosphere… I want to do something in SHOWstudio which feels like an active exhibition… because this is an active studio, we’re still working, creating and shooting and filming it now. So I want people to feel part of that. It’s in the name SHOWstudio, like, come and look!”

Knight puts his desire to connect art to life, and his openness to other people’s opinions and lifestyles, down to his upbringing. He was born in England and raised in Paris by his psychologist father and physiotherapist mother. “My parents brought me up very, very liberally. So I was allowed to do basically what I wanted,” he says. “We were never punished for doing things, which, of course, you learn by trial and error then, and of course, when I was 13-14, I thought it’s great, brilliant. Now look back on it, was it just negligence? I have mixed feelings about that, and I haven’t brought up my kids in the same way”, he laughs. “I’ve always felt that there’s a need to push back against censorship, to push back against boundaries,” he continues, “to understand other people’s opinions and to understand things which are presented to us in a dogmatic way.”

He admits that the question of how to deal with artists and art that goes against your views is a “tricky” one. Artists are human, and throughout history, there have been some nasty ones: Caravaggio, “apparently responsible for three, four, maybe five murders”, Jackson Pollock, “a gun-toting, wife beating, alcoholic”, and Pierre Molinier, the artist hung on the wall behind Knight, “he made love to his dead sister,” he says. “Does one say, ‘I can’t consider his work, I can’t show his work, I can’t look at his work’, or do we say, ‘let’s try and understand what was going on? Why would he feel that way?’” “My own personal approach is to try and divorce the work from the artist, and not judge the art by the person that made it. We also have to have some degree of… not empathy, but at least… a desire to try and understand why somebody does something, rather than to shut them down.”

In terms of controversial content online, sex is up there. To Knight, the problem is not just about freedom of expression, it’s about gender discrimination. Infamously, on Instagram, male nipples are allowed, while female nipples are banned and breastfeeding is classed as sexual imagery. “If you’re saying you can’t show it, that implies there’s something wrong with it. And for most people who have breasts, you’re saying there’s something wrong with their body. Whereas a man’s body is fine, a woman’s body is not.” Knight gestures to the Harley Weir’s photo, Bits, hanging at the other end of the room. “Harley Weir, who’s got a picture over there, found herself banned, her Instagram account shut down because she had put a picture of a young woman with menstrual blood between her legs. And Harley fought that and got her account opened up again.”

Downstairs, in the main studio space, is a small bronze sculpture by painter Emma Stern: a sculpture of a cheerleader in miniskirt and pigtails, a fine art version of the erotic anime figurines you see on teenage gamers desks. Around the corner, Instagram-famous artist Oh de Laval’s painting Taste Lingers Even if Everything Else Fades Away recalls a heated encounter which ended with Oh and her lover eating warm, melted toffee. Some of the highlights of the show are the original Tom of Finland drawings, lent by the Tom of Finland Foundation. These erotic artworks are delicate hand-drawn sketches, made on small sheets of paper that could be hidden in envelopes and stuffed into luggage to avoid the customs inspections that caught and destroyed so many of Tom’s works. It’s a historic example of how artists have gotten around censorious authorities.

Knight is troubled by how many younger artists are having their imagination shaped by censorship. They limit themselves without even realising it. He recalls a conversation with performance artist Miles Greenberg, another contributor to the show, during which Knight asked if he censors himself. Greenberg replied that he finds himself thinking ‘if I create a piece of work, will someone come to his performance and post a picture or a video online?’ The knowledge of how his work will be shared online shapes the work. “So he’s starting to change his art to take on board the morality of the censor on Instagram… I think that now there’s a sort of creeping morality that’s coming into imagery,” Knight says.

I ask Knight, if platforms are limiting artistic expression and shaping images beyond their boundaries, then shouldn’t artists abandon social media, move offline and set up their own uncensored exhibitions, such as Knight has done? He admits it’s a difficult choice, one that artists are unlikely to make. They have to balance control vs exposure, and most would rather take the greater exposure that online platforms allow, compared to exhibitions. He points out that “if I put a picture online I might get 10,000 people, 100,000 people seeing it. Here, I might get 50,000 people over six months.” He points out that those visitors who come to the exhibition will also probably be aware of the artists and familiar with their work or point of view. He would rather have people discover artists they don’t know and encounter new ways of thinking and seeing.

Knight says that he’s actually shied away from galleries through his career, “I would much rather somebody see my work on the way to buy vegetables, or when they take the bus home,” he says. In his mind, the importance of art is in the power of the image, which means it communicates something to you, not where it’s seen or who it’s by. And if platforms continue to shadow ban powerful images, we’ll end up in a much worse place.