Idris Khan and Melodic Accumulation

Born in Birmingham in 1978, Idris Khan lives and works in London. In 2017, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for his contribution to art. Inspired by art history, music, and philosophical and theological texts, Khan creates in a variety of media, including sculpture, painting and photography. He is known for his mastery of layering techniques, which he uses to arrive at what might be considered “the essence of an image.” More specifically, in creating his works, Khan overlaps images, musical notes and words. When applied to the pages of a book, for example, this technique results in a tension between the readability and accessibility of the text: although the text as a whole can still be seen at a glance, the avalanche of accumulated visual information renders its content illegible. These amalgams are presented as a kind of palimpsest that arises from the artist’s cumulative approach.

Employing a variety of source documents, Khan produces entirely new works that evoke themes of memory, creativity, and the layering of experience. The creations emerging from these primary materials – whether musical scores, books or works of art history – prompt us to question modes of appropriation, as well as notions of religion, the attribution of works, and abstraction.

While Khan’s reworking of his source materials can be seen as an act of destruction – taking them to the brink of being unrecognizable – it is actually an act of reverence to their original creators. Indeed, his works embody the dedication, if not obsession, of artists towards their subject matter or artistic practice. For example, Khan has on several occasions turned his attention to the work of photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, known for their photographs documenting and immortalizing industrial structures such as water towers and silos.

By condensing the entire collection of the Bechers’ images into a single photograph, Khan produces a ghostly composition that evokes the passage of time. When superimposed, the slight differences between each of the structures photographed by the Bechers give a sense of movement to the whole. Moreover, because the lines and contours have been blurred by this process, Khan’s “compilation photos” give the effect of a drawing.

The two works offered to the Museum make reference to music. Khan’s interest in this art form stems from its proximity to photography, which also acts as a trigger for memory and remembrance. Moreover, these works come from a period in Khan’s artistic career, when he was particularly inspired by minimalist artists and composers such as Carl Andre, Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman, Philip Glass and Steve Reich.

Different Trains’ January Twenty Third 2010

By superimposing pages from the musical score of Different Trains (1988), by Steve Reich, Khan reveals the gradually evolving mutations in the rhythm and melodic lines of this piece for string quartet and magnetic tape. In this work, Reich draws a parallel with the trains he took as a child between his divorced parents in New York and Los Angeles, and the trains that transported Jews to the concentration camps in Europe during the same period. Himself a Jew, the composer is acutely aware that he would have taken very different trains had he lived in Europe rather than the United States during World War II.

To create Different Trains’ January Twenty Third 2010, Khan layered between 20 and 30 photographs over each other, rendering the musical notes almost indecipherable. Despite this, the work is particularly expressive, and the ear strains to hear the sounds as the eye scans the score. Upon closer observation, the blurred spots fade, giving way to notes that appear to move on the wall: one suddenly has the impression of being able to capture the entire piece at a glance. Rhythm plays an essential role here, both musically and visually, appearing in the notes that remain visible and in the gaps between them, as well as in the staves and between the systems of the musical score.

Listening to Glenn Gould’s Version of The Goldberg Variations while Thinking about Carl Andre

This imposing work, whose title references both music and visual arts, is composed of 30 steel panels installed perpendicularly to each other along the junction between the floor and the wall. Through the centre of each panel runs an accumulation of melodic lines that are no longer legible as music. Taken from Glenn Gould’s score of J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations, these lines are superimposed at differing levels of intensity. The composition for keyboard is one of the German composer’s best known and most accomplished works, and for many represents the pinnacle of contrapuntal writing. The artist’s choice of Glenn Gould’s version of Bach’s opus is no coincidence, as the famous Canadian pianist’s interpretations of the work contributed greatly to its popularity. “I’m fascinated by Glenn Gould as a person, as a pianist, as a musician,” Khan says. “He’d make everything his own, and I guess that’s what I try to do in the work as well... It’s not direct appropriation, but it’s using an idea from someone before me.”¹  

Khan’s synthesis of the Goldberg Variations is inspired by studio recordings in which the eccentric pianist is heard repeating his scores over and over again, almost obsessively. It is this constant interpretation and reinterpretation of familiar patterns that musicians do that captured the artist’s fascination and compelled him to make it the subject of his work.

Listening to Glenn Gould’s Version of The Goldberg Variations while Thinking about Carl Andre also references the American minimalist artist Carl Andre and his work Fall (1968). Khan chooses to contrast the rawness of the industrial materials preferred by Andre with the elegance of Bach’s musical score. Employing the aggressive technique of sandblasting to cast the musical notes onto the steel surface, the artist adds a poetic touch to the minimalist aesthetic of the steel panels. The superimposition of the staves makes it possible to infer a musical score, even though the individual notes remain obscured.