LIGHT BOX

Idris Khan

B 0 R
F R U
I D R
I C 0
I C 0

N
S T
I S
N S
N 0

F
A T I 0 N
'S
K H A N
0 F
C L A S N

0
R

words:
MARK RAPPOLT

portrait:
ANTOINE

D'AGATA

Blossfeldt...
After
Karl Blossfeldt
'Art Forms in
Nature', 2005,
Lamda digital
C-print mounted
on aluminium,
258 x 192 cm

IDRIS KHAN IS A PHOTOGRAPHER LIKE NO OTHER. That's largely because a lot of the time
his photographs don't look like photographs at all. Sometimes they look like drawings, sometimes
they look like paintings and sometimes... well, sometimes they look like bad photocopies. (That's bad
in the sense of almost illegible, which is precisely not what a photocopy is supposed to be.)
Nevertheless, over the past two years the twenty-eight-year-old has been generating a lot of fuss:
he's had his work bought by Charles Saatchi, created a stir at the 2004 Frieze Art Fair, been featured
in The Independent's list of top-ten emerging London talents and been photographed suited, booted
and lounging beneath a tree for the London Evening Standardsversion of the same. But don't let
all that put you off. In between the glamour shoots he's managed to put on an extremely successful
solo show at San Francisco's Fraenkel Gallery and is currently preparing for his big London debut at
Victoria Miro this September.>
105

ARTREVIEW

LIGHT BOX
Idris Khan

you almost get the feeling

that Khan has taken a comedy mallet to the structures
the Bechers venerated,
beaten the crap out of them
(the structures not the Bechers)
and then rushed back to photograph it
ARTREVIEW

106

LIGHT BOX
Idris Khan

left:

"Idon't try to make a photograph look like a

painting or drawing," the Birmingham-born artist
protests, while pacing around his spotless northLondon studio. "Itjust happens." On the wall behind
him isevery.. Bernd &Hilla Becher Prison Type
Gasholder (2004). Black, smudgy and everywhere
covered with the ghostly traces of what seem to be
partially rubbed-out areas, it looks, inescapably, like
a charcoal rendering. Albeit made by one of the
most anxious and indecisive draftsmen of all time.
But that effect "just happens" as a result of the way
Khan creates his work - by layering a number of
photographic images one on top of the other, while
digitally manipulating them to emphasise certain
details or to enhance areas of light and shade.
Nevertheless, the fact that the photographs upon
which Khan's works are based are not generally his
own, but are instead appropriated - from the
oeuvres of celebrated practitioners from the
medium's past, such as the Bechers, Karl Blossfeldt
or Eadward Muybridge, from musical scores, other
people's paintings and from works of literature combined with the fact that his digital manipulations
occur with the aid of a graphics tablet and stylus
(the computer equivalent of pen and paper), makes
you wonder whether calling what Khan does
'photography' isn't actually a little perverse. "Maybe
it goes back to frustration at the fact that I can't
draw," Khan concedes, "and so I have to make a
photograph look like a drawing." But, then again,
why worry? It's precisely that kind of perversity that
generates the most arresting aspects of his work.
every.. Bernd &Hilla Becher Prison Type
Gasholder is,as the title suggests, every Becher
photograph of that particular shape of gas
tank mashed one on top of the other and presented
as a single image. The result is a curious mix of
the iconic and the iconoclastic. On the one hand it's
the summary of all prison-type gasholders and an
act of homage to the Bechers - Khan focusing the

from Rising
Series... After
Eadweard Muybridge
'Human and Animal
Locomotion', 2005,
5 x platinum
prints, each print
51 x 41 cm

same kind of obsessive intensity (months spent

layering, lightening, darkening, retouching)
on Bernd and Hilla's imagery that led the German
couple to spend more than 40 years producing their
fetishistic typology of neglected industrial
architecture. "Ithought about how I could capture
the aura of a piece of artwork," Khan says. On the
other hand it's an act of vandalism, a wilful
undermining of the clinical and objective method
of Becher photography, which Khan replaces with an
expressionistic rendering of a building whose
pulsating, blurry outline suggests that it is struggling
to escape the constraints of its designated 'prisontype' form. Indeed, you almost get the feeling that
Khan has taken a comedy mallet to the structures
the Bechers so famously venerated, beaten the crap
out of them (the structures, not the Bechers) and
then rushed back to photograph the architecture
while it's still vibrating as a result of that pounding.
Perhaps it's not surprising then that "frustration" is a
word that crops up frequently while Khan discusses
his work. Or that he describes his resonating imagery
as the result of a process that
is "like visualising a sound".
facing page:
every... Bernd &
Hilla
Becher Type
Gasholder, 2004,
Lamda digital
C print mounted
on aluminium,
203 x 165 cm
below:
every... stave of
Frederick Chopin's
Nocturnes for
Lhe Piano, 2004,
Lamda digital
C-print mounted
on aluminium,
89 x 279 cm

In works like every., stave of Frederick Chopin's

Nocturnes for the Piano (2004) or Struggling to
Hear... After Ludwig van Beethoven Sonatas (2005)
Khan has approached that last task in a more literal
fashion, producing photographic club sandwiches
filled with the staves and pages of the relevant
musical scores. The Chopin is a barely legible
jumble, the Beethoven an almost solid black blur.
But while it's almost impossible to make out the
individual notes that constitute the music, these
works do serve to bring certain aspects of Khan's
practice into sharp focus.

107

ARTREVIEW

LIGHT BOX
Idris Khan

Perhaps, then, what's most engaging about Khan's

work isthat it provides a thrill similar to that
provoked by the element of risk involved inany
battle. A thrill that comes about in the way in which
his layered images seem to court their own
destruction - what exactly does a black streak tell us
about Beethoven's sonatas? 'Nothing' would be a
not unreasonable answer - while opening
themselves up to quite searching, human speculation
- what's it like to go deaf? Or, inthe case of the
Bechers, and their obsessive archiving of the
twentieth century's forgotten monuments,
speculation about the nature of memory and lost
pasts. ('A lot of my work has to do with memory or
searching for something - that blurriness of a
memory where you can't quite pinpoint it.") And it's
going to be intriguing, to say the least, to see how
Khan continues to push the limits of his humanised
photography in future works.

"When I make the music pieces there's a certain

frustration involved," the artist says, warming to his
favourite theme, "because when Iwas growing
up Icould read music, but I played by ear." Like the
Becher pieces, Khan's musical works are icons
inasmuch as they represent the sum total
of a musical composition and are consequently,
in technical terms, complete descriptions of that
particular work. But they are also iconoclastic in
that they defy any attempts to read them to the
point that they seem to celebrate, almost gleefully,
the erasure of any coherent instruction as to how
that music should be performed. The Beethoven
piece is all of Beethoven's sonatas and it is none,
just as the Becher gasholder isevery gasholder
and none.
"Iwanted to capture that same kind of struggle
Beethoven had while losing his hearing," Khan
explains. 'And to recreate that experience with the
viewer." In doing so, Khan also highlights the gap
between the representation of sound (in the form
of written music) and actual sound, just as the
Becher piece highlights the gap between a
photograph and the object it represents (yes, you
can photograph every prison-type gasholder, the
Becher work seems to say, but that doesn't mean
you've necessarily captured the reality of what a
prison-type gasholder is). As much as Khan is
compressing a series of photographs he also seems
to be tearing photography, and the commonly held
notion of its objective and mechanical qualities,
apart. "It's a battle against the photographic surface
in some ways," he concedes.

ARTREVIEW

108

Infact, Khan is already taking things a stage

further and iscurrently working on his first video
project, to be screened at London's inlVA, also in
September. It consists, once more, of layered
images, this time of a solo cello player performing all
of Bach's cello suites, and, in a new twist, features
sound. "Last night Iwas watching the playbacks,"
the artist says rather nervously, "and thinking that it's
either going to be really frustrating or really, really
nice - people may want to leave because it sounds
like a wailing cat." Chances are they won't.
While his layered and compressed images are
made ina sophisticated manner, and open
themselves up to equally sophisticated analysis
(elements of which - Freud's uncanny, bits and
pieces of Barthes -Khan has made direct reference
to inother works) what they try to express is
something basic and primal, something that, at
times, doesn't feel too far removed from a grunt
or a scream.
Work by Idris Khan is on show at Victoria Miro Gallery,
London from 2 to 30 September. After... Bach's Cello
Suites... A Memory is at inIVA, London from 13
September to 22 October.

left:
Cellist, Gabriella
Swallow and director
of photography Belinda
Parsons during the
shooting of Idris
Khan's After... Bach's
Cello Suites ... A
Memory, June 2006.
Photo: Thierry Bal

LIGHT BOX
Idris Khan

every... William
Turner postcard
from Tate Britain,
2004, Lamda digital
C-print mounted
on aluminium,
101 x
All

127

cm.

images

courtesy

Victoria

Miro

Gallery,

London

'I

don't try and make a photograph look like a painting

or a drawing
it

just

happens.'

109

ARTREVIEW

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

TITLE: BORN OF FRUSTRATION: IDRIS KHANS ICONS OF

ICONOCLASM
SOURCE: Art Review (London, England) no2 Ag 2006
PAGE(S): 104-9
WN: 0621304391032
Copyright Art Review, Ltd. USA and Canadian subscription to Art
Review are handled by agents: International Media Service, 3330
Pacific Ave., Ste. 404, Virginia Beach, VA 23451, 800-428-3003.
Annual subscription price $79, Canada $85. Our Internet address is
http://www.art-review.co.uk

Copyright 1982-2006 The H.W. Wilson Company.

All rights reserved.