Working the Room. Geoff Dyer
lifting clear of the body, a dream of waking. It’s like a photographic equivalent of Henri Fuseli’s Nightmare, an out-of-body experience made flesh – and vice versa.
To learn more about artists’ working methods some paintings have been X-rayed so that preliminary versions of masterpieces are brought to the surface. Khan’s photographs are a kind of reverse X-ray, laying bare by accretion. Marrying up the eyes of all Rembrandt’s self-portraits, reducing them to the same size and layering them digitally together, Khan effectively photographs him with an exposure time lasting the length of the artist’s life. ‘Rembrandt by Himself’ offers an experience akin to the painter looking at the mirror in the moment of his death, when the evidence of a lifetime of intense self-scrutiny flashes before his grave-dark eyes in a single instant.
As is always the case with artists of considerable originality there are precedents for these essays in visual condensation. Most recently, there are Fiona Banner’s paintings in which a film is verbally transcribed in her own hand so that an entire movie can be seen – but not read – in an instant, on a single canvas. In the 1970s Hiroshi Sugimoto began photographing empty movie palaces and drive-ins. Using an exposure time equal to the duration of the film, Sugimoto reduced the contents of whatever was on screen – car chases, murders, betrayals, romance – to a single moment of radiant whiteness. The most explicit precursors, however, are also the earliest. They also enable us to view Khan’s situation and methods in a broader historical and contemporary context.
In the late nineteenth century, photography became an important tool in an alliance between some of the ‘scientific’ fads of the day – physiognomy, eugenics, racial taxonomy – and attempts by the police and the state to isolate types likely to commit crimes. Writing in 1882, Francis Galton declared that there could ‘hardly be a more appropriate method of discovering the central physiognomic type of any race or group than that of composite portraiture’. His composites of convicted criminals duly showed ‘not the criminal, but the man who is liable to fall into crime’. Using similar techniques Arthur Batut, in France, made ‘type-portraits’ to identify the defining traits of particular races, tribes or families (including his own). In a phrase that might have come from Khan’s own lips, Batut spoke of these composites as ‘images of the invisible’, images that shimmer with the same ghostly air that we see in Khan’s.
At which point it is worth emphasising that Khan is himself a composite of artist and photographer. For more than a few current practitioners the advantages of identifying themselves as artists rather than photographers can be summed up as a six-word hustle: Print bigger, sell less for more. For my money Khan is as much of an artist – in the simple sense of everything that is left over from just calling him a photographer – as any young photographer currently working. He is a conceptual artist in an equally straightforward sense: thought is implicit in the act of looking at his work. A lot of contemporary British art flogging itself as conceptual has the intellectual depth of a paddling pool and the gravitas of a helium balloon; Khan’s work is dense, multi-layered (literally) and profound.
The danger is that this composite thing could just become his shtick. He could do every page of every book, every this of every that. ‘Every … Photograph Taken Whilst Travelling Around Europe in the Summer of 2002’ seems a rather pointless novelty – there’s nothing to see. Its relative failure suggests that Khan’s method tends to work better when applied to already existing works of art. You can almost hear certain books summoning him to them. It is only a matter of time, surely, before he does every page of Borges’ story ‘The Aleph’, in which the narrator discovers a spot where ‘all the places of the world, seen from every angle, coexist’. Needless to say, not everything lends itself equally fruitfully to his attention. Garry Winogrand said that he took photographs ‘to find out what something will look like photographed’ and Khan, in his mediated way, is motivated by a similarly random curiosity about what might emerge when he opts to give an image the treatment. I’m guessing that a fair amount of stuff gets processed and then discarded once the preliminary findings are in. It’s a small price to pay when the successes are as spectacular as the huge ‘Caravaggio: His Last Years’. Fifteen late works by the painter who, according to John Berger, depicted a world that ‘displays itself in hiding’, who found a promise ‘in the darkness itself’, are turned into a tangled kaleidoscope of disembodied bodies, a swirling knot of light.
In the course of these negative excavations a form of auto-interrogation is at work as Khan’s ‘discoveries’ question the ways in which accumulation can both reveal and obscure essence. ‘Every … William Turner Postcard from Tate Britain’ transforms these great paintings of light and air into a brooding soup with an amoeba-mushroom curdling in the swampy twilight. And yet something glimmers, faintly, through the murk. What could it be?
Walter Benjamin claimed that mechanical reproduction, the process of which Tate postcards are symptoms and which Khan has pushed to an extreme, stripped artworks of their ‘aura’. Ironic ally, Khan’s obsessive reproduction invests works with an aura buried within them. Consistent with Barthes’ notion of what makes a photograph special, this is, simultaneously, something that Khan adds to the originals and which, nonetheless, is already there.
2006
Whether seen on the walls of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, or in the accompanying book published by Steidl, the photographs in Oil bring the viewer face to face with huge and troubling questions. How can we go on producing on this scale? How can we go on consuming like this? Aren’t we at the point where we say, OK, enough is enough? Is it sustainable, the level of luxury and lavishness to which we have become accustomed? In short, how many more of these high-concept, high-value Edward Burtynsky productions can we take?
I am being only slightly facetious. Burtynsky (born in Ontario in 1955) hit his stride in the mid-1980s with the large-format, colour views of Railcuts and Mines, places where raw nature had been scarred and gorged by the agents of economic progress. What resulted, however, was not simply maiming or devastation but a source of potential wonder. By the time of the 2003 retrospective and book Manufactured Landscapes, Burtynsky had extended his range to cover quarries, shipbreaking in Bangladesh, oil fields and refineries, compacted mounds of trash …
Burtynsky’s work has obvious similarities with that of other artist-photographers. Like Richard Misrach (especially in the ‘Bravo 20’ instalment of his ongoing Desert Cantos project), Burtynsky produces images whose beauty is freighted with a political/ecological purpose that is unavoidable and unobtrusive. The pictures can never be reduced to a polemical message, are always compelling – often puzzlingly so – in and of themselves. Some of the quarries, for example, comprise almost abstract blocks of striated marble, floating in a lake of flat, motionless green. Weirdly, the hard, grey-white stones with vertical gouge-scars and veins end up looking like billowing Christo wraps. Even when there are human beings or tools to help us get a fix on things, the scale is hard to comprehend. In some cases, the assault on the landscape is so immense that the idea on which we have long relied to visually orient ourselves – linear perspective – has been abolished. The ecological corollary of this is that we are witnessing something whose consequences are incalculable – if not entirely unprecedented. For it turns out that the template for this outlook was provided by an extraordinary 1932 photograph of a quarry by August Sander (of all people) which hurled the viewer into the vertiginous midst of the picture. Burtynsky’s contemporary vision, in other words, is the product of a creative quarrying of the photographic past. Carleton Watkins, William Henry Jackson, Charles Sheeler and others directly inform Burtynsky’s work and, in turn, are respectfully interrogated and re-animated by it. Burtynsky, then, is an original artist in exactly the sense described and prescribed by T.S. Eliot: part of a tradition that is actively extended and reconfigured by his contribution to it.
The intellectual background to the wealth of photographs showcased in Oil can conveniently be framed by two casual remarks. The first was reported by Raymond Williams, who recalled a miner saying of someone: ‘He’s the sort of man who gets up in the morning and presses a switch and expects a light to come on.’