Idris Khan’s current exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum, “Repeat After Me,” on view through August 11, is as the title suggests, repetitive. It’s awash in layers of recycled information that settle into sedimentary compositions blurring the lines between objectivity and abstraction. Though repetition isn’t typically the first quality most would look to on the way to originality, Khan’s work finds complexity in the idea, looking at how perceptual information settles into history over time.
A significant portion of art history has been a game of taking a three-dimensional world and recreating it on flat surfaces. Landscapes, boating parties, still-lifes with skulls and lobster shells. But Khan complicates this history by adding another dimension: that of time. Time as layers of fugitive sensory material. The show kicks off with images of works by Rembrandt, Turner, Caravaggio and other canonical artists that he has stacked into transparent clouds retaining only the slightest hints of their referent material. His REMBRANDT…BY HIMSELF offers us the iconic figure’s portrait as an obscured palimpsest that begs one to wonder why it’s so frustrating for an image that is already burned clearly into their minds to remain obscured. Time is as responsible for our understanding of Rembrandt’s self-portrait as he is, and Khan’s interpretation reels the whole process back to an inchoate scramble of possibilities.
Art history is filled with folks who’ve thought about imaging time. One thinks of Eadweard Muybridge, On Kawara, or the Bechers, whose crisp serial photography Khan complicates in the exhibition. But by layering rather than arraying his subjects, Khan compresses their histories even as they appear to have expanded inside our consciousnesses. His work seems to suggest that as an icon matures, it accumulates meaning but loses control of its definition. His use of stacked transparency delivers the metaphor powerfully. But it’s worth noting that not all of Khan’s work is photographic and static. The exhibition includes some conceptual sculpture and a digital video, titled LAST 3 PIANO SONATAS…AFTER FRANZ SCHUBERT, which brings sound and moving imagery into play. However, the piece succeeds on very similar conceits as his conceptual photography, by questioning the relationship between a singular work and the complex tissue of contingencies that shape it.
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Khan’s work is constantly considering the nature of information. Information as both waves and particles, and as so many bits and bytes impossibly trying to connect with the cultural God-matter they make possible but can never know. Many have asked where Franz Schubert’s Sonata or Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is. Like, where do they actually reside? It seems like an easy question until one realizes it’s everywhere and nowhere all at once. Khan’s Covid-19 project The Seasons Turn revels in this chilling contradiction. The project layers the musical notation of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons on top of landscape paintings corresponding to the seasons in the concerti. The work is a masterful reminder of how we are conveniently delivered from formless mental and emotional expanses by the necessary handles that labels, icons and rituals provide. And as always, the striking visual allure of his work is an outgrowth of the parts-to-whole discussion.
What are we receiving when we see or hear something so familiar we don’t know if we are seeing it or remembering it? Is this a sign of preservation of dissolution? Maybe a false dichotomy? Idris Khan’s work mediates delightfully in this irreconcilable custody battle for meaning. I thought of Khan’s work as a sort of map of time as I was walking through “Repeat After Me.” A map about maps. Or a map of how we map time in our minds. Khan’s work, like all maps offers perspective as it loses detail, and gains detail as it loses perspective. The only uncompromised map is an exact copy of the subject, so when mapping Caravaggio and Twombly over time it seems an artist might be the best cartographer.
Event Listings: April 21–April 27, 2024
MARN ART+CULTURE Hub
- MARN Trivia with Sculpture Milwaukee
- Monday, April 28, 6–8 p.m.
MARN ART+CULTURE Hub
- What Does Support for Artists and Mentorship Look Like?
- Wednesday, April 24, 5– 8 p.m.
MARN ART+CULTURE Hub
- MARNexchange with Siara Berry
- Thursday, April 25, 5–7 p.m.
UWM Union Art Gallery
- Opening Reception: “One Sky we Share”
- Thursday, April 25, 5–8 p.m.
Milwaukee Art Museum
- Gallery Talk: “50 Paintings”
- Thursday, April 25, 12–1 p.m.
Milwaukee Art Museum
- Lecture: “Black Men in Red: 19th-Century Models in Color”
- Thursday, April 25, 6:15–7:15 p.m.
Museum of Wisconsin Art
- Teen Art Meetup
- Friday, April 26, 4–6 p.m.
Kenilworth Square East Gallery
- Art & Design MFA Exhibition: “Determinant Reflections”
- Friday, April 26, 5–9 p.m.
MARN ART+CULTURE Hub
- The Good Land
- Friday, April 26, 6–8 p.m.
Real Tinsel
- Opening Reception: “Poseurs II”
- Friday, April 26, 6–8 p.m.
Mitchell Park Domes
- Art in the Domes
- Saturday, April 27, 9 a.m.–4 p.m.
Milwaukee Art Museum
- Drop-In Art Making: Kohl’s Art Studio
- Saturday, April 27, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.
Milwaukee Art Museum
- Story Time in the Galleries
- Saturday, April 27, 10:30–11 a.m.
Milwaukee Art Museum
- Gallery Talk: “Idris Khan: Repeat After Me”
- Saturday, April 27, 1–2 p.m.
Milwaukee Art Museum
- Drop-In Tours: Architecture and Collection Highlights
- Saturdauy, April 27, 2–3 p.m.
Pfister Hotel
- Art Studio Tour with Artist-in-Residence Heidi Parkes
- Saturday, April 27, 4–5 p.m.
Museum of Wisconsin Art
- Opening Reception: Mark Mulhern
- Saturday, April 27, 2–4 p.m.
Saint Kate – The Arts Hotel
- AIR Time, Art & Studio Tour with AIR Anwar Floyd-Pruitt
- Saturday, April 27, 6:30 pm
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