The Artist’s Museum: MMX, a work in situ, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), October 2010, 2010

L​A-based artist John Knight is one of the major figures associated with the foundations and development of Conceptual art globally. Along with artists such as Michael Asher, Hans Haacke, Dan Graham, and others, he instigated a radically new and highly influential form of practice in the late-1960s that was project-oriented, site-specific, and committed to an engagement with art's economic, political, and symbolic conditions of production and reception.

The Artist's Museum: MMX, a work in situ, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), October 2010​ tak​es the form of an engraving on the granite surface of one of the columns in MOCA Grand Avenue's interior plaza, The Artist's Museum: MMX refers, both materially and conceptually, to the architectural convention of the cornerstone: a commemorative marker usually placed at a conspicuous ground-level location on a building's perimeter or near an entrance, meant to announce the "foundation" of a building or institution and as such to symbolize history, place, and identity.

The Artist's Museum: MMX refers to an idea or mythology of the museum that MOCA has attempted to embody in practice or in spirit since it was founded: to be a place for artists, of artists, following in their examples, and open to experiment. Knight's permanent engraving commemorates this, but also holds it up for judgment, asking viewers to weigh just what an "artist's museum" might be, just how its history or time are known to us, just what it might mean now.

This is a work that unfolds the more one considers it. On one level it proposes a kind of architectural analysis: inserting a convention of modern architecture into a resolutely "post-modern" edifice. On another level, the work's permanence and institutional gravitas subject the very myth of the artist's museum—with its implications of democracy, collectivity, and marginality—to a kind of ironic scrutiny. And on a third level, The Artist's Museum: MMX is about the specific institution that is MOCA: a mirroring of the identity the museum itself has projected at various times and for various reasons.